[saga-rg] SAGA, object states, and concurrency

['Thilo Kielmann']

Dear Hartmut,

I am happy to hear about the acceptance of BOOST.
However, we have to be careful as we are working on standardizing the 
language-independent SAGA API here. 
The C++-related features should go to the C++ language binding.
In there, we must use today's C++ standard, unless there is strong evidence
that "tomorrow" (meaning: BOOST becoming standard) is going to happen really 
soon now. But this discussion should be deferred to the writing of the C++
language binding. (We just should keep the language-independent SAGA spec
clean of this issue.)


After another night of thinking:

I believe that the language-independent SAGA spec must not prescribe any
memory management and object lifetime issues at all.
This is purely to be addressed in the language bindings, same as with
thread safety.

So, my revised suggestion is:

a) The SAGA specification does NOT address issues of object life cycle 
   and memory management at all. It is subject to the language bindings
   of SAGA to define this in a way that suits the respective programming
   languages.


Further, I think we should have a disclaimer in the SAGA spec like:

The programmaning examples used in this document are for illustrative
purposes only. They do NOT prescribe any bindings to particular programming
languages. These will be defined in companion documents.



Thilo
-- 
Thilo Kielmann                                 http://www.cs.vu.nl/~kielmann/