user-defined types and basic_string

[Martin Sebor]

Matte Austere wrote:

...

> But the biggest problem, I think, is that specializing char_traits is 
> just a
> tiny piece of the work that users need to do to write a new character
> type.  Seems to me that anyone who's capable of writing a specialization
> std::ctype<my_char> is more than capable of writing 
> std::char_traits<my_char>,
> and it'll be a specialization that's right, not just a generic version 
> that's almost right.

> 
> I vote for leaving the generic std::char_traits undefined.


You're probably right if one needs the character type to work with
iostreams. But if all one wants is a basic_string<int> or any other
specialization on a native type besides char and wchar_t, I'd say
the almost right primary template is perfectly adequate.

Martin