Boost.Spirit

Here’s another BoostCon video uploaded by Marshall Clow. This one is about Phoenix V3, by Hartmut Kaiser:

http://blip.tv/boostcon/phoenix-v3-an-overview-5250984

The slides for this talk can be found here: https://github.com/boostcon/2011_presentations/blob/master/mon/phoenix_v3.pdf?raw=true.

Phoenix will be the next generation of creating unnamed, inlined polymorphic function objects. With V3 we combine the functionality of Boost.Bind and Boost.Lambda, and arranges it into a new library. By writing this new library, we were able to fix some limitations of the aforementioned libraries without breaking backwardscompatibility. The purpose of the talk will be to outline the importance and elegance of functional programming (FP) in C++. The first part of the talk will give an introduction into the Domain Specific Embedded Language (DSEL) we defined with Phoenix. A DSEL is built with the help of regular C++ function and operator overloads. For Phoenix we defined such a language that emulates C++, to give potential users a low entry into the world of FP. While a lot of existing C++ code relies on higher order functions (better known as function objects), e.g. the C++ standard library use them as a way to let users customize operations in certain algorithms. We focus the second part of the talk on examples on how to use Phoenix instead of writing regular function objects and how to enable your legacy code to be used inside Phoenix expressions. However, Phoenix is more. Phoenix is equipped with a unique (in C++) mechanism to handle the expressions discussed in the previous sections as data. This allows us to handle Phoenix not in the C++ standard way but in any way you like. An overview of these mechanisms will be given in the last part of the talk to give potential users an insight on possible future applications that might evolve around Phoenix.