On Monday, March 25, 2024, Jonathan Wakely wrote:
>
>
> At some point we do have to accept that this poster is just spamming the
> list with half baked nonsense.
>


This mailing list isn't exclusively for finalised papers.

Every idea starts out as a 'half-baked idea', although there are other
terms for such embryonic thinkings.

Sometimes an idea should be kept secret until it has been researched and
developed. And sometimes an idea should be shared right at the very
beginning.

Not trying to get all biblical on you here but let's consider the rudder of
a ship. If the rudder is off by a few degrees at the very beginning of the
journey, then the error over a long distance can result in significant
deviation. Ideas can be like this too. Some ideas should be shared at the
'half-baked idea' stage, so they can be floated for people to pass remark
-- and that's what I intended here with having a new syntax for
'^template^'. It seems my only oversight on this occasion was that I hadn't
seen an explicit deduction guide before.

Some ideas should be floated here on the mailing list in their pre-baking
phase to get people's thoughts and opinions. Maybe you want a separate
mailing list just for finalised papers though, or for ideas with at least X
hours of research and development.

Not every idea should be shared prematurely though. I'm currently writing a
paper to add self-modifying code to the C++ standard. I don't want to
curtail my own creativity and so I've purposely not shared my idea with
anyone, nor have I researched any pre-existing library that does
self-modifying code nor 'just in time compilation'. I don't know if my idea
is original, or if it's been done independently 7 times in the past 10
years, but I want to polish it off all by myself before asking for opinions
or comparing my own technique to how other people did it.

I can't find the original mission statement for this mailing list, but it
was posted here a while back, and I believe it contained the term 'float an
idea'.