Earl Miles wrote:
> Warren Young wrote:
>
>> But recently, it came to me that the integer overloads were probably
>> the least useful of the bunch in real-world code. Intelligent
>> database design doesn't make the client code dependent on the number
>> or order of database columns. So, I wonder if it would have been
>> better to keep operator[](const char*) instead.
>
>
> This depends a lot on how important lookup speed is. The integer lookup
> is bound to be faster than the string lookup. Though there's already
> enough of a speed hit in the mysqlpp::Row stuff that it may not matter.
>
> However, I can say that my code currently does use the numeric index
> lookup, because it knows what order the fields are in (they match
> another list it's keeping). So there's at least one instance of real
> world code that uses it.
Noted, but study the patch a little more carefully: it still provides
Row::col_num() to get a field by column number.
The question ultimately is, which of the two methods of access should be
given the more convenient array index access method?
Code like in lib/custom.h isn't meant to be read very often. Code like
in the MySQL++ examples is definitely intended to be read, often: it
must be as clear as possible. Considering just these two examples, it
would seem logical that it's okay for custom.h to use col_num() lookups
because clarity isn't as valuable as speed here, while the examples
should do lookups by column name, in the interest of maximum code clarity.
