Interactive D?

[Jari-Matti Mäkelä]

On Tue, 26 Feb 2008, Oskar Linde wrote:

> Jari-Matti Mäkelä wrote:
>> Some further ideas:
>> 
>> catching exceptions, displaying the values and types of structs/classes and 
>> their members recursively (if the default uses toString) -- hopefully this 
>> will encourage Walter to fix some of the unspecified behavior with 
>> .stringof, exporting the current state to a file, locating symbol 
>> definitions.
>
> Catching exceptions actually already work:

Cool.

> Regarding stringof. The following is irritating, given:
>
> template A(T) { struct A {} }
> template B(T) { struct A {} struct B {} }
>
> A!(int) a;
> B!(int).B b;
>
> How do I reliably get the string representation of the type of a and b?
>
> There are two ways that I know of:
>
> 1. typeid(typeof(x)).toString
> 2. typeof(x).stringof
>
> The problem is that the results are:
>
> 1A: test.A!(int).A	WRONG
> 1B: test.B!(int).B	CORRECT
>
> 2A: A!(int) 		CORRECT (although not fully qualified)
> 2B: B 			WRONG

demangle(x.mangleof), x.init.stringof, and 
typeid(typeof(x)).stringof) seem to be the only ways to return the full 
FQN (including template member names) on compile time, but one needs to 
have a demangle routine then first.

> Your other points are interesting and useful, but some of them are quite 
> hard. I can't do much more than the D compiler can do at compile + runtime 
> together.

The reflection stuff should be possible to do on compile time (only enums 
fail). I'm not sure about exporting current state, now that I heard how 
the utility works. Locating definitions is probably the hardest and needs 
FQNs, maybe something more.