All of the existing "simple" tests for the »Diff Framework« are way to much low-level;
they might indeed be elementary, but not introductory and simple to grasp.
We need a very simplistic example to show off the idea of mutation by diff,
and this simple example can then be used to build further usage test cases.
My actual goal for #1206 to have such a very basic usage demonstration and then
to attach a listener to this setup, and verify it is actually triggered.
PS: the name "GenNodeBasic_test" is somewhat pathetic, this test covers a lot
of ground and is anything but "basic". GenNode in fact became a widely used
fundamental data structure within Lumiera, and -- admittedly -- the existing
implementation might be somewhat simplistic, while the whole concept as such
is demanding, and we should accept that as the state of affairs
...rather extend the "object builder" DSL notation to allow passing in a given EntryID literally.
Rationale is, we should handle the problem of unique IDs on the level of the domain model.
If we attempt to "fix" this within GenNode, the price would be to make the ETD creation stateful
this bit of Sed magic relies on the fact that we happen to write
the almost correct class name of a test into the header comment.
HOWTO:
for F in $(find tests -type f \( -name '*.cpp' \) -exec egrep -q '§§TODO§§' {} \; -print);
do sed -r -i -e'
2 {h;x;s/\s+(.+)\(Test\).*$/\\ref \1_test/;x};
/§§TODO§§/ {s/§§TODO§§//;G;s/\n//}'
$F;
done
Doxygen will only process files with a @file documentation comment.
Up to now, none of our test code has such a comment, preventing the
cross-links to unit tests from working.
This is unfortunate, since unit tests, and even the code comments there,
can be considered as the most useful form of technical documentation.
Thus I'll start an initiative to fill in those missing comments automatically
reason is, only files with a @file comment will be processed
with further documentation commands. For this reason, our Doxygen
documentation is lacking a lot of entries.
HOWTO:
find src -type f \( -name '*.cpp' -or -name '*.hpp' \) -not -exec egrep -q '\*.+@file' {} \; -print -exec sed -i -r -e'\_\*/_,$ { 1,+0 a\
\
\
/** @file §§§\
** TODO §§§\
*/
}' {} \;
the rationale is that I deliberately do not want to provide
a mechanism to iterate "over all contents in stringified form".
Because this could be seen as an invitation to process GenNode-
datastructures in an imperative way. Please recall we do not
want that. Users shall either *match* contents (using a visitor),
or they are required to know the type of the contents beforehand.
Both cases favour structural and type based programming over
dynamic run-time based inspection of contents
The actual task prompting me to add this iteration mechanism
is that I want to build a diagnostic, which allows to verify
that a binding message was sent over the bus with some
specific parameter values.
- remove unnecessary includes
- expunge all remaining usages of boost::format
- able to leave out the expliti string(elm) in output
- drop various operator<<, since we're now picking up
custom string conversions automatically
- delete diagnostics headers, which are now largely superfluous
- use newer helper functions occasionally
I didn't blindly change any usage of <iostream> though;
sometimes, just using the output streams right away
seems adequate.
initially the intention was to include a "bracketing construct"
into the values returned by the iterator. After considering
the various implementation and representation approaches,
it seems more appropriate just to expose a measure for the
depth-in-tree through the iterator itself, leaving any concerns
about navigation and structure reconstruction to the usage site.
As rationale we consider the full tree reconstruction as a very
specialised use case, and as such the normal "just iteration" usage
should not pay for this in terms of iterator size and implementation
complexity. Once a "level" measure is exposed, the usage site
can do precisely the same, with the help of the
HierarchyOrientationIndicator.
Whooa!
Templates are powerful.
programming this way is really fun.
under the assumption that the parts are logical,
all conceivable combinations of theses parts are bound to be correct
it passes compilation, but the test still fails, since
I've changed the expected semantics of the iteration,
in the light of the insights I've gained during
re-investigation of the IterExplorer.
What I now actually intend is rather to embed a
HierarchyOrientationIndicator into the iterator,
instead of returning a special "bracket" marker
reference to indicate return from a nested scope.
remembered that some years ago I had to deal with a very similar problem
for planning the frame rendering jobs. It turned out, that the
iterator monad developed for this looks promising for our task at hand
this design is rather into the blue,
not sure what we actually need for diff generation
and object serialisation. Anyhow, I considered including
a bracketing construct a good idea, and I considered it
sensible to expose inner nodes, not only the leaf nodes.
Obviously, this is not a real monad iteration then.
horay!
seems like madness?
well -- found and squashed a bug: equality on RecordRef
implicitly converted to GenNode(RecordRef), which always
generates new (distinct) IDs and so never succeeds. What
we really want is equality test on the references
Note: not fixing all relevant warnings.
Especially, the "-Woverloaded-virtual" of Clang defeats the whole purpose
of generated generic interfaces. For example, our Variant type is instantiated
with a list of types the variant can hold. Through metaprogramming, this
instantiation generates also an embedded Visitor interface, which has
virtual 'handle(TY)' functions for all the types in question
The client now may implement, or even partially implement this Visitor,
to retrieve specific data out of given Variant instance with unknown conent.
To complain that some other virtual overload is now shaddowed is besides the point,
so we might consider to disable this warning altogether
after sleeping a night over this, it seems obvios
that we do not want to start the build proces "implicitly",
starting from a Record<GenNode>. Rather, we always want
the user to plant a dedicated Mutator object, which then
can remain noncopyable and is passed by reference through
the whole builder chain. Movin innards of *this object*
are moved away a the end of the chain does not pose much risk.
especially I've now decided how to handle const-ness:
We're open to all forms of const-ness, the actual usage decides.
const GenNode will only expose a const& to the data values
still TODO is the object builder notation for diff::Record
these speical reference-flavours of a GenNode are built
to stand-in for a full fledged "object" GenNode.
The purpose is to be able to handle sub-trees of objects
efficiently in comparisions and processing.
This is just a draft for now -- kindof a by-catch, since it is
chep to build that DSL on top of the Rec::Mutator.
This DSL could be of value later, when it comes to define
some configuration data inline, in a copact and clear fashion,
without the need to use a bridge to/from JSON
- can build from the supported value types
- is optionally named
- is copyable value, but only assignable within one payload type
- is recursive, for object / tree representation
to carry out that rather obvious step, I was bound to consider
all the implications of choosing a given layout and handling pattern
for our external structure representation.
Finally, I settled upon the following decisions
- the value space represented within the DataCap is flat, not further structured
- the distinction between "attribute" and "nested object" is merely conceptual
and will be enforced solely by the diff detection / representation protocol
- basically, a nested subtree may appear as an attribute; the difference
between attributes and children lies solely in the way of access and referral:
by-name vs. positional
- it is pointless to save space for the representation of the discriminator ID
- but we can omit any further explicit type tag, because
- we do *not* support programming by switch-on-type, and thus
- we do *not* support full introspection, only a passive type-safety check
- this is *not* a limitation, since we acknowledge that GenNode is a *Monad*
- and the partial function needed within any flatMap implementation
maps naturally onto our Variant-Visitor; thus
- the DataCap can basically just *be* a Variant
- and GenNode has just to supply the neccessary shaffolding
to turn that into a full fledged Monad implementation, including
direct construction by wrapping a value and flatMap with tree walk
- we use a GenNode element
- this holds a polymorphic value known as DataCap
- besides simple attribute values, this may hold collections of GenNode sub elements
- a special kind of GenNode collection, the Record, is used to represent objects
The purpose of this setup is to enable an external model representation
which is only loosely coupled to the interndal data representation
through the exchange of (tree)diff messages
