Re: [Opencxx-users] understanding TypeInfo

[Stefan S. <sse...@ar...>]

Hi Gilles,

Gilles J. Seguin wrote:

>On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 21:42, Stefan Seefeld wrote:

>>What's the semantics (goal in general, invariants, etc.)
>>of the following methods:
>>
>>* Encoding::GetBaseName()
>>* Encoding::ResolveTypedefName()
>>* TypeInfo::Reference()
>>* TypeInfo::Dereference()
>>* TypeInfo::Normalize()
>>* TypeInfo::SkipCv()
>>* TypeInfo::SkipName()
>>* TypeInfo::ResolveTypedef()
>>
>>Thanks for any clarification !
>
>
>Allo stephan,
>
>One word, mangling.

yeah, I know. I do understand the principles of
type encoding and name mangling in general.

My problem is with the specifics of the above
methods. To explain my question a bit better:

right now everything in opencxx is done with
garbage collected character buffers. That's
almost as bad as passing void pointers around.
I'd like to replace 'char *' by 'const char *'
where ptrees point into the file buffer that
is being parsed. For the encodings I'm using
std::basic_string<unsigned char>.

Now, there are public methods that generate
new 'derived' encodings from old ones (the
same way you can derive types). However, some
methods are merely used to parse an encoding,
i.e. they don't need to create a new encoding
but simply return a pointer *into* an existing
encoding (I'm of course using iterators for that).

Take the 'SkipCV' method: it sounds as if it
returns the sub-encoding with potential 'cv'
tags stripped off. An ideal candidate for
an iterator, one would think.
However, if you look into the code, you realize
that there's quite a bit more going on.

And that's exactly what I'd like to understand
in detail... :-)

Regards,
		Stefan