In this session, I will take a request from the boost mailing list: | Why doesn’t boost have hex/unhex functions, I think they would be useful. And walk through the design and implementation of these algorithms for the Boost.Algorithm library. Although the functions are simple, there are a surprising number of interesting design decisions that were made along the way – and I will explore them in this talk. Issues covered: 1) Generic programming design 2) Dealing with iterators (including the problems with output iterators) 3) Template metaprogramming (including enable_if) 4) Boost.Exception 5) Fit and polish of code.