Re: Auto type conversion in target languages

[bickiia at earlham dot edu]

"Marisha Ray & Neil Jerram" <mpriz@dircon.co.uk> wrote:
>>Short of this I
>>don't see any good solution.
>
>But we could use some kind of reflection to get the basic 
>information automatically, where reflection can be either
>documentation-based - type information is snarfed from the 
>documentation - or the reflection that GOOPS >currently 
>provides for generic functions.  The obvious problem with 
>GOOPS reflection, though, is that it doesn't apply to most 
>existing (non-generic) functions.  But when GOOPS is integrated 
>into the core, I don't know - (speculating wildly) maybe 
>someone has a plan for extending reflection to all functions?

I'm not sure how GOOPS reflection works, but I'd imagine that even
generic functions might have a prefered type.  For instance, display
works most Tcl-like on strings -- if you display a port, for instance,
in Tcl a port is just a name for a port (the string representation). 
But display can certainly take a port... should it be generic, or should
it prefer a string?

Maybe it's too restrictive to make everything have a default type
(though of course, container functions can't have that).

>>Including type-information in the documentation is a potential way to

>>make all of this transparent to the end-user/programmer and encourage

>>universality.
>
>I don't understand what you mean by transparency and universality 
>in this context.  

Just that all functions would be accessible to the Tcl programmer, and
it wouldn't require a Tcl-maintainer to go back and document everyone's
functions prefered types.

  -- Ian