Warp wrote:
>   If a program has not been designed to be reusable, then it isn't.

Well, it is, of course, if it's just a library exposing an API. The problem 
is the pile of things the program depends upon that aren't standardized, and 
so each program wants something different there.  I guess sort of the 
language-level equivalent of DLL Hell.

If you have several different parser libraries, for example (say, XML, HTTP 
headers, message catalogs) and they all depend on different implementations 
of unicode strings, what's a good way of making it so you don't have to 
convert between unicode string representations each time you move data from 
the message catalog to an XML record sent over HTTP?  That's the kind of 
question I'm asking.  Or even if it's just bunches of typedefs, considering 
the C and C++ languages lack enough parsability or after-compile metadata to 
make it easy to actually find the declarations and uses and do a global 
replace on type names.  (As in, try to correctly rename type "i8" to "int8" 
everywhere in the code without manually inspecting each instance.)

Of course, the more powerful the language, the easier it is to do some sort 
of translation between types there, up to the point where you have a 
language that (gasp) already has unicode strings built in from day one. (Or 
at least day N where N < the original authoring date of any code you want to 
use.)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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