TypeInfoEx and Variant: suggestions?

[Daniel Keep]

Christopher Wright wrote:
> Daniel Keep wrote:
>> Use the Tango Variant code.  It supports values of any size and doesn't
>> require knowledge of the compile-time type.
> 
> Not so. That was one of three reasons that I wrote my own Variant
> previously (the others being toString and sameness comparison).

What not so?  I know for a fact it supports values of any size, so I
assume you're referring to compile-time.  With the new patch you can
pack and unpack Variants from TypeInfo and a void* so you DON'T need to
know the type ahead of time.  There isn't a way to construct from a
single TypeInfo,void* pair since I wasn't sure if that would actually be
needed.

toString is a design issue, not a technical one; they didn't want stuff
in tango.core depending on stuff outside of that.  If you look at the
history of Variant, there's an old version with "proper" toString code
that should port forward painlessly.

On a side note, I'm working on getting Tango's Layout to understand
Variants and do the "proper" stringification.  Still trying to work out
how to get the changes to compile without having to rebuild Tango...
*grumble*

As for comparisons, it supports opEqual and opCmp between Variants, it
just doesn't attempt to do any automatic conversion between
non-identical but comparable types (like comparing ints to longs.)

Is there something specific you think Tango's Variant should do that it
doesn't?

  -- Daniel