As a gen­eral rule, I swore years ago to stay as far away from web design and web devel­op­ment as at all pos­si­ble. I still believe that this is one of the fun­da­men­tal rules of hap­pi­ness, and I haven’t regret­ted it, but for once, I was actu­ally impressed (rather than depressed, which is what web devel­op­ment usu­ally makes me feel like) with a few pieces of web design, and so I decided to make an excep­tion and talk about it for a moment.

After launch­ing this blog ear­lier today, I spent a bit of time research­ing how to get a more intu­itive syn­tax for for­mat­ting my posts. I’m not really a fan of “rich text” text edi­tors like the one Word­Press uses by default (luck­ily it can be dis­abled). It offers lim­ited con­trol, is awk­ward to use, and just doesn’t lend itself to well-formatted posts.

So I decided to look for alternatives.

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So I just dis­cov­ered that Con­cepts have appar­ently been dropped from the C++0x stan­dard draft.

On the sur­face, a strange, strange deci­sion. Con­cepts was, prob­a­bly more than any­thing else, the face of C++0x. Remov­ing that is going to make a lot of peo­ple won­der “so why do we need the new stan­dard again?”

It was billed as the fea­ture that would make C++ usable for non-experts again. It was going to show C# gener­ics and their ane­mic con­straints mech­a­nism “how it should be done”. And now it’s gone. Why, and what does it mean for C++?

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