(Lack of) Progress Report on Cleaner Signals and Slots Implementation

[Marcus <ma...@my...>]

I've spent some time lately looking through Qt's documentation and source code 
to see if we can come up with a cleaner way to implement signals and slots. 
Adam really wanted to avoid having all the custom prototypes for each slot 
type. What we really need is to something akin to

Connect( QObject* sender, const char* signalName, QObject* receiver, void* 
slotFunction )

The problem is that Qt goes to great lengths to allow the user to specify the 
slot as a string (char*) rather than a function pointer. Qt uses moc to 
create data structures at compile time to map between signal/slot names are 
methods. Unfortunately, these data structures are not officially sanctioned 
by TrollTech.

So far I have not found a simple way to achieve what we want without either 
using undocumented functions. By "undocumented" functions, I mean functions 
that are not listed in the for the classes in $QTDIR/doc/html. I will 
continue to look for something, but I'm not sure that I will find it.

I have even looked at PyQt to see how they handle this, and it appears that 
they do something similar to what we are currently doing. We can probably 
clean the code up a bit, but unless we are willing to use some gray-area 
functionality of Qt, we might have to retain the current approach.

I wil conitnue looking, but it would like some feedback.