what he said. we can extend this to a lot of boost-covered stuff. a C implementation of boost::optional would be similarly opaque and clumsy, i think.

i also can't begin to imagine how to implement scoped-lifetime objects in C. even without exceptions (which admittedly do cause some conceptual pain in C++), the ability to know that wherever you return from within a function, relevant local objects will be cleaned up has a significant simplifying effect on the design of a function.

so yes, you can certainly get along without these ideas and write very sophisticated software. the issue is really about whether you want to. when i went to write a functor class a few months ago, i got about 90% of the way there in a few hours. then i went and read the boost headers and realized there was an entire universe of semantic details that i was overlooking and that to get all the way "there" would take me weeks, assuming i ever got there. so i could (a) do without functors or (b) use the boost implementation. i chose (a).

--p