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<title>Boost Header policy</title>
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<h1>Boost Header Policy</h1>
<p>Header files are the place where a library comes into contact with user code
and other libraries. To co-exist peacefully and productively, headers must
be "good neighbors".</p>
<p>Here are the standards for boost headers. Many of
these are also reasonable guidelines for general use.
<ul>
<li>Header filenames should have a .hpp (lowercase) extension. </li>
<li>Unless multiple inclusion is intended, wrap the header in #ifndef guards.
Use a naming convention that minimizes the chance of clashes
with macro names from other's code. The <a href="#SampleHeader">sample
header</a> uses the Boost convention of all uppercase letters, with the
header name prefixed by the namespace name, and suffixed with HPP, separated
by underscores.</li>
<li>Wrap the header contents in a namespace to prevent global namespace
pollution. The namespace approach to pollution control is strongly preferred
to older approaches such as adding funny prefixes to global names.
Libraries which are designed to work well with other Boost libraries should
be placed in namespace <tt>boost</tt>.</li>
<li>Make sure that a translation unit consisting of just the
contents of the header file will compile successfully.</li>
<li>Place the header file in a sub-directory to prevent conflict with
identically named header files in other libraries. The parent
directory is added to the compiler's include search path. Then both
your code and user code specifies the sub-directory in <tt>#include</tt>
directives. Thus the header <a href="#SampleHeader">sample header</a>
would be included by <tt>#include <boost/furball.hpp></tt></li>
<li>The preferred ordering for class definitions is public members, protected
members, and finally private members.</li>
<li>Include the boost/config.hpp <a href="../libs/config/config.htm">configuration
header</a> if there is a need to deal with compiler or platform
configuration issues.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a name="SampleHeader"></a>Sample Header</h2>
<pre><tt>// Boost general library furball.hpp header file ---------------------------//
<<i> Copyright and license notice</i>, as indicated in the <a href="license_info.html">license page</a> >
// See http://www.boost.org/ for latest version.
#ifndef BOOST_FURBALL_HPP
#define BOOST_FURBALL_HPP
namespace boost {
// Furball class declaration -----------------------------------------------//
class furball
{
public:
void throw_up();
private:
int whatever;
}; // furball
} // namespace
#endif // include guard</tt></pre>
<h2>Coding Style</h2>
<p>The alert reader will have noticed that the <a href="#SampleHeader">sample
header</a> employs a certain coding style for indentation, positioning braces,
commenting ending braces, and similar formatting issues. These stylistic
issues are viewed as personal preferences and are not part of the Boost Header
Policy.</p>
<hr>
<p>Revised <!--webbot bot="Timestamp" s-type="EDITED" s-format="%d %B, %Y" startspan -->02 October, 2003<!--webbot bot="Timestamp" endspan i-checksum="38549" --></p>
<p>© Copyright Beman Dawes 1998</p>
<p>
Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See
accompanying file <a href="../LICENSE_1_0.txt">LICENSE_1_0.txt</a> or copy
at <a href="http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt">http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt</a>)
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