On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 10:56 PM Mingxin Wang via Std-Proposals <std-proposals@lists.isocpp.org> wrote:

This seems useful. However, the motivation seems not to be strong enough, because

  1. Although some other languages may have such functionality, I think C++ should not copy everything without a deep thinking and clear motivation.
  2. Even it could simplify the “find != npos” pattern, I do not find this pattern widely existing in engineering.
  3. If we take one step backward, even if it is a useful pattern, we may turn to regex for more readability and extendibility rather than “find != npos”.
  4. The name has already been used in other facilities like “set” or “map” with completely different semantics, which may confuse the beginners and decrease “teachability”.

 

Therefore, I would suggest investigating more on the motivation. For the fourth comment above, I think “includes” could be a better name than “contains”.

 

Regards,

Mingxin Wang


How do map::contains() and set::contains() have "completely different semantics" than the proposed string::contains()? They seem exactly the same to me. It's even the same motivation - wanting to avoid the boilerplate of map.find(x) != map.end() is the same as wanting to avoid the boilerplate of str.find(x) != npos. 

Barry