Difference between revisions of "Talk:Main Page"

Revision as of 09:29, 5 October 2012

Do you think that another category dedicated to utilities and libraries could be included here?

something like tutorials/examples for make, autoconf, where to find libraries, etc. Just so that the user can obtain all the resources in a single place.

Alexhairyman 07:47, 24 April 2012 (PDT)

I don't think that these subjects would fit into this wiki. We specialize in C and C++ and the wiki is structured specifically for these languages. -- P12 08:22, 24 April 2012 (PDT)

Not even a development process/miscellaneous page? Something for coding standards/style, that may be too opinionated for a site with reference in its' name but I feel it would benefit many, I know an integral part of my learning c/c++ was the various tools available to me. Or some basic data on the windows.h and the posix standard documentation, at least where you can find out more information. Alexhairyman 14:04, 24 April 2012 (PDT)

Style wouldn't be opinitionated if it was backed by reliable references.. but what would they be? Besides a few books (Sutter/Alexandrescu, Sutter alone, Meyers, Lakos), there's not much else - you're left with slides from ACCU conferences (where available), Dr. Dobbs, C++ Source, and other online magazines, Sutter's GOTW, which are all opinionated to varying degrees. working through all those primary sources would be like writing your own book. Now the documentation idea could be useful, I think: there already are occasional links to POSIX and MSDN in some of the existing pages here. We could use a small dedicated page listing available online C++ references (IBM, Comeau, Apache, MSDN, cplusplus.com, STL) and related standards (POSIX, Unicode). --Cubbi 15:05, 24 April 2012 (PDT)

I've considered such idea before, but haven't implemented it yet. A directory of links to useful resources is a very good thing to have. Maybe it's time to start one? -- P12 15:40, 24 April 2012 (PDT)

I think a 'links to resources' page is a fine idea, as long as we keep the scope limited to the best of the best -- maybe one rule of thumb would be to not let it grow past one screenful. What I think we should avoid is having a dumping ground for everything vaguely related to C or C++, which won't help people looking for good information and will be hard to maintain. --Nate 19:01, 24 April 2012 (PDT)

But I think the problem is where to put it. Do we want to add another category? Or simply link in a page where relevant? (which would kind of suck for end-users) I would be happy to do the research for the linux/posix side. The easiest link to throw down is the documentation to Glibc, although organized a little oddly, it makes finding out how to solve your Unix problem much easier, and is super complete. Links to boost.org would be a must also, apache portable runtime, etc. Rather than a new section, a respective page for each language may work too. I think though, that we should come to a common consensus before anyone makes some major change to the wiki. Btw, Thank you all for being so welcoming to a new member in your community, I've been watching the site for a few months now, and it has really become much more expansive and useful! Alexhairyman 22:26, 26 April 2012 (PDT)

We're always happy to have more people helping out.  :) As far as where to put a single 'links to resources' page, perhaps we could start by putting one at the top level of the C++ site: http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/resources (I'm assuming that it would make sense to have C++-specific resources, given the links that e.g. Cubbi proposed above.) Once it seems solid, we could start by linking to it from the FAQ. --Nate 04:04, 27 April 2012 (PDT)

What do you think about cpp/links as the location of that page? Resources seems to imply that we are hosting something, whereas links correctly describes the content of the page - it's just a list of links. It is also a shorter URL by the way. -- P12 13:42, 27 April 2012 (PDT)

"cpp/links" works for me. --Nate 15:55, 27 April 2012 (PDT)

All in favor say aye! I say aye! cpp/links Alexhairyman 09:28, 29 April 2012 (PDT)

I agree that there are valid reasons for having such additional information somewhere. I object to this particular solution of the problem, not the idea itself. May I explain this using an example. Imagine two extreme cases. The first one: there's a single wiki about C, C++, make, autoconf, etc. - everything mixed. The second one: there are a number of different wikis one for a particular subject. Which one would be easier to manage and better for the reader? The first one, believe me, would eventually become a huge mess, because the C/C++ material would slowly mix with other material and vice-versa. Thus I'm advocating for a set of wikis with strictly defined boundaries, each specializing into a particular subject. We specialize in C and C++ reference. I'd be happy if someone created a similar, specialized wiki for make/autoconf (I might even help to set everything up). But I'm against including the same material here. -- P12 15:45, 24 April 2012 (PDT)

Template arguments

Most of the templates in C++ have requirements on their template arguments. Some of these requirements are quite complex. Therefore, I think it's worth to add a separate section outlining these requirements, with links to concepts, if appropriate. I am, however, unsure, in which format the arguments should be described. Here's what I have thought of so far:

Option 1: A separate section before the parameters section.

Template parameters

Option 2: Additional explanation after the main description, before the parameters section:

Template parameters:

• InputIt1, InputIt2: must meet the requirements of Template:concept.
• BinaryPred: must meet the requirements of Template:concept}}

In addition to that, I'm unsure what exact terminology should we use: "template parameters", or "template arguments", or "type requirements", or something other. Finally, after adding the longer explanations of type requirements, the names of the types can be shortened, as there won't be any need to convey full explanation just by the name of the identifier. So we probably should agree what consistent names we will use throughout the wiki. Here's the initial list:

• InputIt - input iterator.
• OutputIt - output iterator.
• ForwardIt - forward iterator.
• BidirIt - bidirectional iterator.
• RandomIt - random access iterator.
• Pred - unary predicate.
• BinaryPred - binary predicate.
• Op - operation.
• BinaryOp - binary operation.
• Traits - traits: string traits, regex traits, etc.
• Alloc - allocator.
• CharT - base characer type.
• ...

What do others think about this? -- P12 08:01, 17 May 2012 (PDT)

I'd prefer option 1 as it puts template parameters closer to the function parameters. There are cases where template parameters *are* the inputs, e.g. in the ratio library, the type traits, std::get (and other functions with non-type template parameters), and I kinda feel that they should be treated similarly. And yes, consistent and precise naming for template params would be great. --Cubbi 10:37, 17 May 2012 (PDT)

I like option 1 as well. --Nate 06:05, 18 May 2012 (PDT)

You should call them template parameters. When you declare a template the names in <> are template parameters. When you instantiate a template the names in <> are template arguments -- Ville 02:28, 11 June 2012 (PDT)

Page width

The wiki pages are too wide and thus places important information to the right of a page. Main page, at least with default theme, places the section headers: "C++ reference" and "C reference" to the left of their respective indices, thus pushing the interesting parts to the right and possibly out-of-view. Those section headers should be placed above their respective indices.

Also the wiki related link sections "Navigation", "Toolbox" and "In other languages" aren't at all that interesting when using this site as a reference. However the links on the right hand side on the individual pages like: http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/array are. Again those are pushed unnecessarily to the right and are again possibly out-of-view. -- Ville 02:43, 11 June 2012 (PDT)

Hi. This problem is known to us. A new layout solving this issue has already been developed and will be deployed in the following days. You can see several examples of the new layout in action: [1] (the main page), [2] (shows the replacement of the right sidebar).

How to write a class that uses a structure as a private datatype and uses it's pointers in the implementation.

class PQueue{ public : /*other public functions and the constructors,destructors*/ private : struct chunkT{ vector<int> nums ; chunkT *next ; }; /*other private functions*/ }

The implementation code uses the struct chunkT to generate a linked lists of the given type but gives many errors .

basically , the error messages reported demonstrate that the compiler did not identify the data type : chunkT

Please suggest a reason for this behaviour or give a sample function to be written in the implementation that uses a pointer to the struct chunkT .

many thanks in advance . :)

--Nikunj 07:46, 16 July 2012 (PDT)

This is a discussion page dedicated to the improvement of this wiki. This is not a forum. Besides, you've already asked your question at one --Cubbi 09:01, 16 July 2012 (PDT)

Pages accessible through built-in Search

Hello everyone -- I'm new to cppreference, just found it and I'm quite interested.

I have a question regarding the built-in search function: it seems to exclude keywords and pages that do not refer exactly to a member of a library. Is it what is wanted? Jocelyn 07:15, 20 July 2012 (PDT)

Yes, our custom search engine isn't sophisticated enough to provide sensible results for arbitrary queries. You can use an external search engine such as Google if the results are inadequate. -- P12 14:07, 20 July 2012 (PDT)

Just to elaborate a bit -- we use a custom search because the built-in plaintext search generates a lot of noise with our specific content. We have been working on improving the custom search, however, so hopefully it will continue to improve. In the meantime, the search results include links to external engines that might get closer to what you expected. --Nate 14:49, 20 July 2012 (PDT)

Suggested page(s)/table(s) - "Since C++11" summary and "C++11 via Boost" summary

I think it would be a good idea to have a page with a table (or separate tables) that lists all of the "since C++11" elements as well as those that came to "C++11 via Boost" elements. The table entries would be click-able links to the language elements themselves.

I am just gauging interest so I'll leave formatting ideas out of this for now as well my reasoning for having such a table. --Arbalest 10:29, 5 October 2012 (PDT)