[pdal] questions about iterator and buffer semantics

[Chris Foster]

On 4 July 2013 00:06, Howard Butler <hobu.inc at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Jul 3, 2013, at 4:21 AM, Mateusz Loskot <mateusz at loskot.net> wrote:
>
>> On 3 July 2013 04:15, Chris Foster <chris.foster at roames.com.au> wrote:
>>> On 3 July 2013 00:55, Howard Butler <hobu.inc at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> The use of a pointer is idiomatic, indeed, but it is not equivalent to
>> exceptions,
>> same with boost::optional - it's just syntactic sugar for nullptr in this case.
>> It is equivalent to the following:
>
> That is very much the intention -- sugar for nullptr. It is also a case of
> Python infecting the C++. Looking through things now, it doesn't appear to
> be even that good of sugar. I will try to create a branch that removes
> getDimensionOptional...

We do need some version getDimensionXXX() which signifies the absence of the
dimension in some other way than throwing.  Whether that's by returning
boost::optional, or by returning a pointer doesn't matter too much in the
grand scheme of things, I'm just picky when it comes to API design ;-)

~Chris