I use C++ every day but I take objection to the following claim
"powerful string manipulation functions"
boost::algorithm::split (and the rest of algorithm, frankly) is unintuitive to use. Regex requires looking up the syntax every time. No encoding/unicode support. Literally 100's of popular string libraries, all incompatible, and that's not even counting all the homebrew. char* everywhere so lots of copying to work with string objects (which is what all of the algorithms work on). Dozens of different and slightly different ways of converting other types and object to/from strings. Poor string formatting functionality, and the solutions that exist are verbose and cumbersome (strstream, boost::format, ...) .
I still love the combination of low-level power and high-level abstraction that C++ provides, but string handling is one of the most problematic areas, in my experience (which is of course colored by the type of work I do, but still).
Yup. C++ isn't a terrible language for scripting, it's mostly the fact that it lacks a single sleek standard library like C# or Python or whatnot offer for normal shell-scripting tasks.
The problem with that is that any such "sleek standard library" doesn't translate the existing (massive) body of C++ code. Using QT is already much better than the standard library though.
Completely agreed - working in areas that I do char* style strings are still commonplace, and that does make you appreciate boost or std::string a great deal more. But it does not hold a candle to the ease of string manipulation in a lot of scripting languages.
Strings are a known problem in C++. Wish the standard committee could end this string nonsense once and for all. Until then I'll just stick to std::string and char *.
"powerful string manipulation functions"
boost::algorithm::split (and the rest of algorithm, frankly) is unintuitive to use. Regex requires looking up the syntax every time. No encoding/unicode support. Literally 100's of popular string libraries, all incompatible, and that's not even counting all the homebrew. char* everywhere so lots of copying to work with string objects (which is what all of the algorithms work on). Dozens of different and slightly different ways of converting other types and object to/from strings. Poor string formatting functionality, and the solutions that exist are verbose and cumbersome (strstream, boost::format, ...) .
I still love the combination of low-level power and high-level abstraction that C++ provides, but string handling is one of the most problematic areas, in my experience (which is of course colored by the type of work I do, but still).