RFC: A new helper class

[Jarosław Staniek]

Allan Sandfeld Jensen wrote:

> On Monday 04 October 2004 14:42, Jarosław Staniek wrote:
>> Hello,
>> Many of us do not use C++ exceptions, while sometimes it's usable to use
>> 3-state logic because boolean is not enough. The 3rd state means
>> sometimes 'cancelled' or 'dontKnow'. Moreover, this logic is also havily
>> used for relational databases. My proposal is a lightweight 'tristate'
>> class as a companion to bool type:
>>
>> http://www.iidea.pl/~js/kexi/download/tristate.h
>>
>> As you can see, the class is 'inline' and there are convenient operators.
>> I used the class in Kexi's code and thus decreased complexity pretty much
>> and cleaned up the code and the API (removed many "bool &cancelled"
>> parameters). Example real-life usage:
>>
>> http://www.iidea.pl/~js/kexi/download/kexidialogbase.cpp
>>
>> Within KDE CVS the class can be located as koffice/kexi/tristate.h.
>> Currently, application developers are free to use the class by copying
>> the file (later maybe that it will be moved to more official place?).
> 
> Maybe I am old-fashioned, but I prefer the traditional C-way of
> representing this:
> int ret;
> ret>0 -> true
> ret==0 -> false
> ret<0 -> error/exception
> 
> It provides more than one abnormal termination type, which you often need,
> and this scheme can also handle any function with positive integer
> return-types.

Depends whether we want to read documentation or have self-documented code. To 
montion C-style, there is also other standard behaviour where 0 means true. 

On the other hand, I am (ans we all) also still _using_ ints for wider cases. 
But there was so many cases for functions using 3-state logic that I've found 
the class usable.

Btw, or would be interesting to have it just in Qt4? :)

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam,
  Jaroslaw Staniek / OpenOffice Polska
  Kexi Project: http://www.kexi-project.org, http://koffice.kde.org/kexi
  QT-KDE Wrapper Project: http://iidea.pl/~js/qkw