Re: [Cppunit-devel] config.h changes committed

[Steve M. R. <ste...@vi...>]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2001 at 05:16:36PM +0200, Baptiste Lepilleur wrote:
> Quoting "Steve M. Robbins" <ste...@vi...>:
> 
> > On Mon, Jun 18, 2001 at 09:03:04AM +0200, Bastiaan Bakker wrote:
> > I am suggesting to eliminate one symbol in favour of the other.
> > If I have to choose, I would keep HAVE_RTTI because it has some
> > precedence: it comes from the autoconf macro archive.  But I can
> > see reasons for preferring to keep USE_TYPEINFO.

>   OK. I did know what's was behind the RTTI thingy (kinda strange, I did not 
> though that you could have the type_info without dynamic_cast).

All I'm saying is that the macro defines HAVE_RTTI based on the
presence of typeid().  You are probably right that dynamic_cast is
present if typeid() is present; I don't know much about RTTI.  It may
be that the reverse is not true, however.  My instinct is to assume
dynamic_cast is available, if needed, (and without checking) until
someone tells us otherwise.


>   Well, I propose to keep USE_TYPEINFO.
> 
>   Our USE_TYPEINFO could be defined as: you have typeinfo, and the name() 
> methode return a human readable name (that last one can't be tested by a 
> machine unfortunately). So it's a stronger requirement than HAVE_RTTI.

It's true that GCC can produce an ungainly type name like

    t23Triangle_3_Plane_3_test1ZQ24CGALt11Homogeneous2ZQ24CGAL4GmpzZQ24CGALt8Quotient1ZQ24CGAL4Gmpz.point_intersection

so the idea of perhaps not using that name has merit.  In that case,
the symbol might be more appropriately-named USE_TYPEINFO_NAME.  You
may still wish to use type_info structures to test equality of
types.

I'll have to think about this.  There seem to be relatively few uses
of using type_info::name() at present, and I'm puzzled by some of them.

For example, what is the purpose of class CppUnit::TypeInfoHelper?  Is
there some advantage to using a class rather than a simple function
CppUnit::getClassName() ?


-Steve

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