Last March, I spent a week and a half in Berlin, Germany. Despite missed airline connections, cancelled flights, and lost luggage, I enjoyed the trip. Its intellectual high point was the Deutches Theater's presentation of a German translation of Othello. My high-school German is pretty rusty, but the elaborate staging and sound effects, combined with a rudimentary familiarity with the plot, made it fairly easy to follow the action. One of the interesting innovations was the halftime show, designed, I suspect, to lure the patrons, out drinking beer and wine in the lobby, back into the theater for the second act. Imagine, if you will, Desdemona and Bianca's slowly simmering conflict erupting into a duel, with each one armed with two swords...
Shortly after that, the C++ Standards Committee met. These meetings don't have the drama of Shakespeare, but they do have the complex plots. Fortunately, they don't usually have tragic endings. They're more like his comedies, where all the complexities get sorted out with explanations that are nearly plausible. This month, I look at how some of the plot lines have so far been resolved, with changes to the C++ Standard that you can look forward to seeing officially sometime in the future.
The biggest change was the addition of almost all of TR1 to the Standard [1]. That means that you'll get smart pointers, four new kinds of call wrappers [2], a bunch of type traits templates for those who enjoy template metaprogramming, random-number generators with well-defined properties and distributions, an array template that should be your replacement for fixed-size C-style arrays, hashed containers, regular expressions, and nearly full C99 library compatibility [3]. I'm not going to talk about that in this column. It's far too big. But we'll look at the rest of the changes, including a few from the meeting last October in Mont Tremblant, Canada.
