Giving proper credit to 'template metaprogramming'

[Sarah Thompson]

Hi all,

I am currently writing an academic paper that talks about a pure ISO C++
class library that depends, at least in part, on template metaprogramming
techniques. I would like to reference the orignal source of the idea, but
as I picked it up from secondary sources myself, I'm not sure what the true
source of the idea was.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Sarah

PS: The class library implements a hardware compiler/partial evaluator as an
embedded language within C++.

 

[John Harrison]

Hi all,

I am currently writing an academic paper that talks about a pure ISO C++
class library that depends, at least in part, on template metaprogramming
techniques. I would like to reference the orignal source of the idea, but
as I picked it up from secondary sources myself, I'm not sure what the true
source of the idea was.

'C++ Templates' by Vendevoorde and Josuttis say the first documented
template metaprogram was by Erwin Unruh. His program produces the prime
number sequence in its error messages, which is pretty neat. They quote the
source of the program.

For serious work and popularising the concept they credit Todd Veldhuizen in
a paper titled 'Using C++ Template Metaprograms' which I haven't read.

John

 

[Sumit Rajan]

Hi all,

I am currently writing an academic paper that talks about a pure ISO C++
class library that depends, at least in part, on template metaprogramming
techniques. I would like to reference the orignal source of the idea, but
as I picked it up from secondary sources myself, I'm not sure what the true
source of the idea was.

Any ideas?

Section 17.1 of "C++ Templates: The Complete Guide" by Vandevoorde and
Josuttis (Addison-Wesley):

"In 1994 during a meeting of the C++ standardization committee, Erwin Unruh
discovered that templates can be used to compute something at compile time.
He wrote a program that produced prime numbers."

A Google search for "Erwin Unruh" came up with his website:
http://www.erwin-unruh.de/
http://www.erwin-unruh.de/meta.html

Regards,
Sumit.