Boost.Spirit

This is the first time I missed attending BoostCon (May 15-20, 2011 – Aspen, Colorado). Fortunately, for us who were not able to attend, Marshall Clow uploaded some videos. Here’s one one that’s relevant to Spirit: “Spirit.Qi in the Real World”, by Robert Stewart. Watch the presentation here:

http://blip.tv/boostcon/spirit-qi-in-the-real-world-5254335

You can find the slides here: https://github.com/boostcon/2011_presentations/raw/master/tue/spirit_qi_in_the_real_world.pdf

Past sessions on Spirit have focused on introducing Spirit or showing extracts of real use, intermingled with tutorial highlights. Upon writing real Spirit.Qi parsers, however, one quickly discovers that “the devil is in the details.” There are special cases, tricks, and idioms that one must discover by trial and error or, perhaps, by following the Spirit mailing list, all of which take time and may not be convenient. In this session, we’ll walk through the development of a Spirit.Qi parser for printf()-style format strings. The result will be a replacement for printf() that is typesafe and efficient.