[BenHinkle]

I don't know if Mike's going to be reading this or not, but here goes...

Mike's Channel port at http://www.csis.gvsu.edu/~swietonm/concurrent.tar.bz2 uses templates and he asked if this is a good idea or not.

It sounds ok to me but I think the generic version should be called something like TChannel and the Object versions should be aliased to Channel. So users who just want to put/take Objects can declare
Channel x = ...
and users who want more control can declare
TChannel!(my_data_structure) x = ...

[swieton]

First off, I noticed I had some inconsistancies in argument order in the new API, so that will definitely change.

Anyway, the advantage of templates is type-safety. The disadvantage of templates is that the code should support variables with value semantics (primitives, etc), which means no more 'just return null'-style reporting, which is why I moved to returning booleans and using out parameters.

I'm not sure I like the change, because it makes it hard to use. Now, I *do* like the idea of using templates to restrict the types. I am somewhat tempted to have a templated version that only allows reference types that follows Doug's API more faithfully, and maybe keeping a second version that's more generic.

An alias could be made to Channel!(Object) for a Java-style channel.

Thoughts?