Jeremy Pack said: (by the date of Wed, 6 Jun 2007 11:25:20 -0700)
7. can you explain shortly what Reflection is? Or some URL with explanation, please.
I think of reflection as runtime type information about the methods of a class for which you do not have access to any of its base classes. As such, there are a lot of directions one could go with it - I'm not sure which direction Mariano will choose. Some of these directions are really hard in C++. I think we'll be discussing that a lot in about three weeks - and will want lots of input from the community.
I see... Some time ago I've been thinking about similar thing also: I wanted to create some Scriptable interface. The C++ coder will register methods in his class using some macros. And later those methods could be called by some kind of interpreter reading from std::cin. Eg. you could register method 'int Foo(int)', and later when the interpreter reads from std::cin a string "Foo(42)" it would parse the input and call this method with appropriate argument, then print the return value. I see where the word 'reflection' comes from - the methods of a class are reflected in some runtime information. I abadoned this project, but the only way that I could see is to use macros - one macro per method. Which effectively doubles the length of *.hpp file with class definition. Maybe it is possible to write some really magic macro, which would allow to declare a method in the class and register it in the same line: class Bar { MAGIC(int Foo(int);) }; that isn't going to work ;) what to do with brackets, etc? What's with that semicolon? ;-) -- Janek Kozicki |