Bjarne Stroustrup On Concepts, C++0x

An anonymous reader writes "Danny Kalev has an interview with Bjarne Stroustrup about the failure of concepts, the technical issues of concepts, whether the ISO committee's days are over, and whether C++ is at a dead-end. 'I don't think that concepts were doomed to fail. Also, I don't think concepts were trying to fix many things or to transform C++ into an almost new language. They were introduced to do one thing: provide direct language support to the by-far dominant use of templates: generic programming. They were intended to allow direct expression of what people already state in comments, in design documents, and in documentation. Every well-designed template is written with a notion of what is required from its arguments. For good code, those requirements are documented (think of the standard's requirements tables). That is, today most templates are designed using an informal notion of concepts.'"

Comments

Re:C++0x?

[betterunixthanunix]

No you need to calm down and thing about the previous designations of C and C++ standards: C++98, C99, etc. C++0x was intended to be a C++ standard released between 2000 and 2009; at this point, it looks like it is actually going to be released in 2010, and we'll all be calling it C++10.

Re:Why not just do duck typing?

[smallfries]

I don't think that they are. There is quite a good comparison on the wiki page. The main difference that springs to mind is that duck typing in Python is dynamic (resolved at runtime), where-as the type system in C++ is static (resolved at compile-time). That makes them very different beasts.