From: ulrich.eckhardt@dominalaser.com   
      
   Am 29.09.2011 20:04, schrieb nmm1@cam.ac.uk:   
   > Does anyone use the STL (and I mean the STL, not BOOST) for scientific   
   > programming and, if so, what parts and for what?   
      
   The STL has not been actively developed for something like a decade, but   
   large parts of it have been incorporated into the C++ standard library.   
   The question now is what exactly you mean, I'll assume that you mean the   
   C++ standard library (CSL).   
      
   Of the CSL, the most important parts to me are IOStreams and   
   containers/iterators/algorithms. In particular the latter are pretty   
   much used anywhere where sequences or mappings are handled in memory.   
      
      
   > I am not talking about incidental use, but where it provides a major   
   > advantage over rolling one's own for the sort of programmer capable   
   > of writing a serious scientific program in a language like C++.   
      
   Why would you write your own? Getting things correct is a non-trivial   
   task. Getting optional diagnostics for undefined behaviour requires even   
   more work, work that has already been done in most implementations.   
   Unless I see a need to do something radically different, my time is too   
   valuable for reinventing, testing, debugging, benchmarking and   
   documenting rounder wheels, let alone teaching my colleagues how they roll.   
      
      
   > The area I have looked at most closely is its array support, and I   
   > can't see that it provides anything worth bothering with.  It is   
   > noteworthy that neither Bjarne's matrix.h nor BOOST make much use   
   > of them.   
      
   What do you mean with "array support"? In C++ an array is a   
   fixed-length, contiguous sequence of objects, like "char x[42]". In the   
   old C++ standard, they are a somehow unwanted child, in particular since   
   they don't provide any STL interfaces. Boost.Array has been written to   
   make up for this lack. If you mean a dynamically resizable array,   
   vector<> is what you are looking for.   
      
      
   > I am interested in knowing which components and which areas of   
   > scientific programming it actually helps with, if any.  I can see   
   > some uses for its associative containers, but haven't studied them   
   > in enough depth to see if they really do provide an advantage.   
      
   To be honest, I don't get what you want. As you noticed yourself,   
   science is a wide field and so is scientific programming. It would help   
   if you said what you want to achieve instead of asking whether something   
   vaguely specified can be done. You also seem to have some problems with   
   the CSL, suggest that others don't use it either, but with no word do   
   you describe what the problem really is. Honestly, it could easily be   
   that you are just using something in a way it is not intended - it's   
   impossible to tell with the available info.   
      
   Cheers!   
      
   Uli   
      
      
   --   
         [ See http://www.gotw.ca/resources/clcm.htm for info about ]   
         [ comp.lang.c++.moderated.    First time posters: Do this! ]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)