Re: Please suggest use-cases for introspective code generation

From:
Le Chaud Lapin <jaibuduvin@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Sat, 6 Sep 2008 14:30:51 CST
Message-ID:
<30cb85dc-0fde-4e52-bc1b-8c744918880b@a70g2000hsh.googlegroups.com>
On Sep 6, 11:29 am, Mathieu Mazerolle <mathieu.mazero...@gmail.com>
wrote:

Introspection is very useful, and has applications such as binding C++
to scripting languages, marshalling objects for RPC, and debugging. In
fact, if your compiler did not generate introspective information about
your program, your debugger would not be very useful.


Salut,

W.R.T. debugging, introspection is a bit oxymoronic. Why would there
be a need to inspect into something for which total knowledge is
already available? When a debugger generates meta-data, let's call
it, there is no introspection. It can see all at will. That is
distinctly different from a program ascertaining the type structure of
its classes at run-time.

It should be a simple matter to define a standard way of inspecting the
static object model and type system of a C++ program. Why has this not
been done yet?


What would do the inspecting? The running program or an external
tool? If it is the former, C++ would need to fundamentally change as
a language. If it is the latter, the the information would not be
usesable unless C++ were fundamentally changed as a language.

So all roads would lead to fundamentally changing C++ as a
language. :)

-Le Chaud Lapin-

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