...this was quite an extensive digression, which basically gave us
a solid foundation for topological addressing and pattern matching
within the "interface space"
rationale: sometimes (likely this is even the standard case) we do not just
want to "extend", rather we want to extent at very specific levels.
This is easy to implement, based on the existing building blocks for path manipulation
the original construction works only as long as we stick to the "classical" Builder syntax,
i.e. use chained calls of the builder functions. But as soon as we just invoke
some builder function for sake of the side-effect on the data within the builder,
this data is destroyed and moved out into the value return type, which unfortunately
is being thrown away right afterwards.
Thus: either make a builder really sideeffect-free, i.e. do each mutation
on a new copy (which is kind of inefficient and counterfeits the whole idea)
or just accept the side-effect and return only a reference.
In this case, we can still return a rvalue-Reference, since at the end
we want to move the product of the build process out into the destination.
This works only due to the C++ concept of sequence points, which ensures
the original object stays alive during the whole evaluation of such a chained
builder expression.
NOTE: the TreeMutator (in namespace lib::diff) also uses a similar Builder construction,
but in *that* case we really build a new product in each step and thus *must*
return a value object, otherwise the reference would already be dangling the
moment we leave the builder function.
- the default should be to look for total coverage
- the predicates should reflect the actual state of the path only
- the 'canXXX' predicates test for possible covering mutation
I set out to "discover" what operations we actually need on the LocationQuery
interface, in order to build a "coordinate resolver" on top. It seems like
this set of operations is clear by now.
It comes somewhat as a surprise that this API is so small. This became possible
through the idea of a ''child iterator'' with the additional ability to delve down and
expand one level of children of the current element. Such can be ''implemented''
by relying on techniques similar to the "Monads" from functional programming.
Let's see if this was a good choice. The price to pay is a high level of ''formal precision''
when dealing with the abstraction barrier. We need to stick strictly to the notion of a
''logical path'' into a tree-like topology, and we need to be strong enough never to
give in and indulge with "the concrete, tangible". The concrete reality of a tree
processing algorithm with memory management plus backtracking is just to complex
to be handled mentally. So either stick to the rules or get lost.
yet some more trickery to get around this design problem.
I just do not want to rework IterSource right now, since this will be
a major change and require more careful consideration.
Thus introduce a workaround and mark it as future work
Using this implementation, "child expansion" should now be possible.
But we do not cover this directly in Unit test yet
we need to layer our Navigator implementation on top,
since this object needs to capture a reference to the "current position".
This is necessary to be able to derive the child position by extending
and then to form a child navigator -- which is the essence of
implementing expandChildren()
...but not yet switched into the main LocationQuery interface,
because that would also break the existing implementation;
recasting this implementation is the next step to do....
...which basically allows us to return any suitable implementation
for the child iterator, even to switch the concrete iteration on each level.
We need this flexibility when implementing navigation through a concrete UI
...at least when using a wrapped Lumiera Iterator as source.
Generally speaking, this is a tricky problem, since real mix-in interfaces
would require the base interface (IterSource) to be declared virtual.
Which incurres a performance penalty on each and every user of IterSource,
even without any mix-in additions. The tricky part with this is to quantify
the relevance of such a performance penalty, since IterSource is meant
to be a generic library facility and is a fundamental building block
on several component interfaces within the architecture.
...yet I do not want to move all of the traits over into the
publicly visible lib::iter_explorer namespace -- I'm quite happy
with these traits being clearly marked as local internal details
NOTE it just type checks right now,
but since meta programming is functional programming, this means
with >90% probability that it might actually work this way....
...which also happens to include sibling and child iteration;
this is an attempt to reconcile the inner contradictions of the design
(we need both absolute flexibility for the type of each child level iterator
yet we want just a single, generic iterator front-end)
...this was a difficult piece of consideration and analysis.
In the end I've settled down on a compromise solution,
with the potential to be extended into the right direction eventually...
surprise: the standard for-Loop causes a copy of the iterator.
From a logical POV this is correct, since the iterator is named,
it can not just be moved into the loop construct and be consumed.
Thus: write a plain old-fashioned for loop and consume the damn thing.
So the top-level call into util::join(&&) decides, if we copy or consume
several extensions and convenience features are conceivable,
but I'll postpone all of them for later, when actual need arises
Note especially there is one recurring design challenge, when creating
such a demand-driven tree evaluation: more often than not it turns out
that "downstream" will need some information about the nested tree structure,
even while, on the surfice, it looks as if the evaluation could be working
completely "linearised". Often, such a need arises from diagnostic features,
and sometimes we want to invoke another API, which in turn could benefit
from knowing something about the original tree structure, even if just
abstracted.
I have no real solution for this problem, but implementing this pipeline builder
leads to a pragmatic workaround: since the iterator already exposes a expandChildren(),
it may as well expose a depth() call, even while keeping anything beyond that
opaque. This is not the clean solution you'd like, but it comes without any
overhead and does not really break the abstraction.
...so sad.
The existing implementation was way more elegant,
just it discarded an exahusted parent element right while in expansion,
so effectively the child sequence took its place. Resolved that by
decomposing the iterNext() operation. And to keep it still readable,
I make the invariant of this class explicit and check it (which
caught yet another undsicovered bug. Yay!)
instead of building a very specific collaboration,
rather just pass the tree depth information over the extended iterator API.
This way, "downstream" clients *can* possibly react on nested scope exploration
...and there is a point where to stop with the mere technicalities,
and return to a design in accordance with the inner nature of things.
Monads are a mere technology, without explicatory power as a concept or pattern
For that reason
- discard the second expansion pattern implemented yesterday,
since it just raises the complexity level for no given reason
- write a summary of my findings while investigating the abilities
of Monads during this design excercise.
- the goal remains to abandon IterExplorer and use the now complete
IterTreeEplorer in its place. Which also defines roughly the extent
to wich monadic techniques can be useful for real world applications
...it can sensibly only be done within the Expander itself.
Question: is this nice-to-have-feature worth the additional complexity
of essentially loading two quite distinct code paths into a single
implementation object?
As it stands, this looks totally confusing to me...
At that time, our home-made Tuple type was replaced by std::tuple,
and then the command framework was extended to also allow command invocation
with arguments packaged as lib::diff::Record<GenNode>
With changeset 0e10ef09ec
A rebinding from std::tuple<ARGS...> to Types<ARGS> was introduced,
but unfortunately this was patched-in on top of the existing Types<ARGS...>
just as a partial specialisation.
Doing it this way is especially silly, since now this rebinding also kicks
in when std::tuple appears as regular payload type within Types<....>
This is what happened here: We have a Lambda taking a std::tuple<int, int>
as argument, yet when extracting the argument type, this rebinding kicks in
and transforms this argument into Types<int, int>
Oh well.
this leads to either unfolding the full tree depth-first,
or, when expanding eagerly, to delve into each sub-branch down to the leaf nodes
Both patterns should be simple to implement on top of what we've built already...
IterSource should be refactored to have an iteration control API similar to IterStateWrapper.
This would resolve the need to pass that pos-pointer over the abstraction barrier,
which is the root cause for all the problems and complexities incurred here
...but for now the price is that we need to punch a hole into IterAdapter.
And obviously, this is all way to tangled and complex on implementation level.
this was a design decision, but now I myself run into that obvious mistake;
thus not sure if this is a good design, or if we need a dedicated operation
to finish the builder and retrieve the iterable result.
as it turned out, when "inheriting" ctors, C++14 removes the base classes' copy ctors.
C++17 will rectify that. Thus for now we need to define explicitly that
we'll accept the base for initialising the derived. But we need do so
only on one location, namely the most down in the chain.
Since this now requires to import iter-adapter-stl.hpp and iter-source.hpp
at the same time, I decided to drop the convenience imports of the STL adapters
into namespace lib. There is no reason to prefer the IterSource-based adapters
over the iter-adapter-stl.hpp variants of the same functionality.
Thus better always import them explicitly at usage site.
...actual implementation of the planned IterSource packaging is only stubbed.
But I needed to redeclare a lot of ctors, which doesn't seem logical
And I get a bad function invocation from another test case which worked correct beforehand.
We need a way for higher layers to discard their caching and re-evaluate,
once some expansion layer was invoked to replace the current element with
its (functionally defined) "children" -- otherwise the first child will
remain obscured by what was there beforehand.
Solution is to pass such manipulation calls through the full chain of
decorators, allowing them to refresh themselves when necessary. To achieve
that technially, we add a base layer to absorb any such call passed down
through the whole decorator chain -- since we can not assume that the
parent, the original source core implements those manipualation calls
like expandChildren()
due to switching from ADL extension points to member functions,
we now need to detect a "state core" type in a different fashion.
The specific twist is that we can not spell out the full signature
in all cases, since the result type will be formed as a consequence
of this type detection. Thus there are now additional detectors to
probe for the presence of a specific function name only, and the
distinction between members and member functions has been sharpened.
Considering the fact that we are bound to introduce yet another iteration control function,
because there is literally no other way to cause a refresh within the IterTreeExplorer-Layers,
it is indicated to reconsider the way how IterStateWrapper attaches to the
iteration control API.
As it turns out, we'll never need an ADL-free function here;
and it seems fully adequate to require all "state core" objects to expose
the API as argument less member function. Because these reflect precisely
the contract of a "state core", so why not have them as member functions.
And as a nice extra, the implementation becomes way more concise in
all the cases refactored with this changeset!
Yet still, we stick to the basic design, *not* relying on virtual functions.
So this is a typical example of a Type Class (or "Concept" in C++ terminology)
- always layer the TreeExplorer (builder) on top of the stack
- always intersperse an IterableDecorator in between adjacent layers
- consequently...
* each layer implementation is now a "state core"
* and the source is now always a Lumiera Iterator
This greatly simplifies all the type rebindings and avoids the
ambiguities in argument converison. Basically now we can always convert
down, and we just need to pick the result type of the bound functor.
Downside is we have now always an adaptation wrapper in between,
but we can assume the compiler is able to optimise such inline
accessors away without overhead.
...yet this seems like a rather bad idea,
it breeds various problems and requires arcane trickery to make it fly
==> abandon this design
==> always intersperse an IterableDecorator between each pair of Layers
...especially relevant in the context of TreeExplorer,
where the general understanding is that the "Data Source" (whatever it is)
will be piggy-backed into the pipeline builder, and this wrapping is
conceived as being essentially a no-op.
It is quite possible we'll even start using such pipeline builders
in concert with move-only types. Just consider a UI-navigator state
hooked up with a massive implementation internal pointer tree attached
to all of the major widgets in the UI. Nothing you want to copy in passing by.
As it turned out, we had two bugs luring in the code base,
with the happy result of one cancelling out the adverse effects of the other
:-D
- a mistake in the invocation of the Itertools (transform, filter,...)
caused them to move and consume any input passed by forwarding, instead
of consuming only the RValue references.
- but util::join did an extraneous copy on its data source, meaning that
in all relevant cases where a *copy* got passed into the Itertools,
only that spurious temporary was consumed by Bug #1.
(Note that most usages of Itertools rely on RValues anyway, since the whole
point of Itertools is to write concise in-line transformation pipelines...)
*** Added additional testcode to prove util::stringify() behaves correct
now in all cases.
Obsoletes and replaces the ad-hoc written type rebindings from
iter-adapter and friends. The new scheme is more consistent and does
less magic, which necessitates an additional remove_pointer<IT> within
the iterator adaptors. Rationale is, "pointer" is treated now just as
a primitive type without additional magic or unwrapping, since it is
impossible to tell generically if the pointer or the pointee was
meant to be the "value"
Oh well.
This kept me busy a whole day long -- and someone less stubborn like myself
would probably supect a "compiler bug" or put the blame on the language C++
So to stress this point: the compiler behaved CORRECT
Just SFINAE is dangerous stuff: the metafunction I concieved yesterday requires
a complete type, yet, under rather specific circumstances, when instantiating
mutually dependent templates (in our case lib::diff::Record<GenNode> is a
recursive type), the distinction between "complete" and "incomplete"
becomes blurry, and depends on the processing order. Which gave the
misleading impression as if there was a side-effect where the presence
of one definition changes the meaning of another one used in the same
program. What happened in fact was just that the evaluation order was
changed, causing the metafunction to fail silently, thus picking
another specialisation.
- we do strip references
- we delegate to nested typedefs
Hoever, we do *not* treat const or pointers in any way special --
if the user want to strip or level these, he has to do so explicitly.
Initially it seemed like a good idea to do something clever here, but
on the long run, such "special treatment" is just good for surprises
...automatically whenever those are present.
Up to now, we hat that as base case, which limited usage to those cases
where we already know such nested definitions are actually present
attempt to re-use the same traits as much as possible
NOTE: new code not passing compiler yet, but refactored old code
does, and still passes unit test
this is a subtle change which, given all interfaces were used in a logically
consistent way, should not cause any observable change to the yielded elements.
But it changes runtime behaviour, insofar now the evalutaion is initiated
lazily, when first requesting a result type. Prior to this change, the
constructor immediately issued a call to the yield() extension point,
which presumably has the side-effect of preparing the core and initiating
any embedded evaluation, in order to get at the first result; it might
even detect an empty state.
Given the fact that all access operations on the iterator front-end perform
an empty check (and possibly throw at that point), this call is redundant.
surprising behaviour encountered while covering more cases
...obviously the return type of ExpandFunctor::operator()
was inferred as value, even while the invoked functor, from which
this type was deduced, clearly returns a reference.
Solution is simple not to rely on inference, moreover since we know
the exact type in the enclosing scope, thanks to the refactoring which
made this ExpandFunctor a nested class
NOTE:
as it turned out, this is not a compiler bug,
but works as defined by the language:
on return type inference, the detected type is decayed,
which usually helps to prevent returning a reference to a temporary
...while this implementation works now, it is still very complex and intricate.
I am still doubtful this is a good approach, but well, we need to try that route....
but possible only for the iterator -> iterator case
Since we can not "probe" a generic lambda, we get only one shot:
we can try to bind it into a std::function with the assumed signature
This is a consequence of the experiments with generic lambdas.
Up to now, lib::meta::_Fun<F> failed with a compilation error
when passing the decltype of such a generic lambda.
The new behaviour is to pick the empty specialisation (std::false_type) in such cases,
allowing to guard explicit specialisations when no suitable functor type
is passed
Basically we want to support two distinct cases, just by slightly adapting
the invocation of the expansion functor:
Case-1: classical monadic flatMap:
the Functor accepts a value yielded by the source iterator
and builds a new "expaneded" iterator
Case-2: manipulation of opaque implementation state
the Functor knows internal details of the source iterator
and thus takes the source iterator as such as argument,
performs some manipulation and then builds a new sub-iterator
A soulution to reconcile those two distinct cases can be built
with the help of a generic lambda
this solution makes me feel somewhat queasy..
stacking several adaptors and wrappers and traits on top of each other.
Well, it type checks and passes the test, so let's trust functional programming
The plan is to use a monad-like scheme, but allow for a lot of leeway
with respect to the src and value types of the expand functor.
A key idea is to allow for a *different* state core than used in the source
...but does not work as intended:
* just forming an IterStateWrapper does not trigger SFINAE cleanly in all cases
* IterStateWrapper can be formed, even when some of the extension points are missing;
this will be uncovered only later, when actually using one of the operations
but beyond that, the basic type selection logic can work this way
Here, the tricky question remains, how to relate this evalutaion scheme
to the well known monadic handling of collections and iterators.
It seems, we can not yet decide upon that question, rather we should
first try to build a concrete implementation of the envisioned algorithm
and then reconsider the question later, to what extent this is "monadic"
This can be seen as a side track, but the hope is
by relying on some kind of monadic evaluation pattern, we'll be
able to to reconcile the IterExplorer draft from 2012 with the requirement
to keep the implementation of "tree position" entirely opaque.
The latter is mandatory in the use case here, since we must not intermingle
the algorithm to resolve UI-coordinates in any way with the code actually
navigating and accessing GTK widgets. Thus, we're forced to build some kind
of abstraction barrier, and this turns out to be surprisingly difficult.
...which was deliberately represented in an asymmetric way, to verify the
design's ability to cope with such implementation intricacies. So basically
we have to kick in at LEVEL == 1 and access the implementation differently.
This exercise just shows again, that treating tree structures recursively
is the way to go, and we should do similar when coding up the query-API
for the real GTK toolkit based window elements...
...which can be helpful when a function usually returns a somewhat dressed-up iterator,
but needs to return a specific fixed value under some circumstances
- fix some warnings due to uninitialised members
(no real problem, since these members get assigned anyway)
- use a lambda as example function right in the test
- use move initialisation and the new util::join
this fixes a silly mistake:
obviously we want named sub-nodes, aka. "Attributes",
but we used the anonymous sub-nodes instead, aka. "Children"
Incidentally, this renders the definitions also way more readable;
in fact the strange post-fix naming notation of the original version
was a clear indication of using the system backwards....
up to now, we allowed only initialisation with a precisely matching type.
But this special case seems worth supporting, since it typically occurs
within the "object builder" syntax based on Rec::Mutator
the intention is to rely solely upon this abstract interface
in order to navigate the structure of the actual UI, so the
resolution process remains decoupled from the technicalities
of the actual UI toolkit set.
Through implementation of the corresponding unit test we'll determine
what it actually takes to build such a path resolution algorithm...
obviously, we get a trivial case, when the path is explicit,
and we need a tricky full blown resolution with backtracking
when forced to interpolate wildcards to cover a given UICoord
spec against the actual UI topology.
Do we need it?
* actually not right now
* but already a complete implementation of the ViewSpec concept
requires such a resolution
It is not possible to inherit through boost operators
and defining them explicitly is not that much fuss either.
Plus we avoid the boost include on widely used header
the usual drill...
once there is one additional non explicit conversion ctor,
lots of preferred conversion paths are opened under various conditions.
The only remedy is to define all ctors explicitly, instead of letting the
compiler infer them (from the imported base class ctors). Because this way
we're able to indicate a yet-more-preferred initialisation path and thus
prevent the compiler from going the conversion route.
In the actual case, the coordinate Builder is the culprit; obviously
we need smooth implicit conversion from builder expressions, and obviously
we also want to restrict Builder's ctors to be used from UICoord solely.
Unfortunately this misleads the compiler to do implement a simple copy construction
from non const reference by going through the prohibited Builder ctor, or to
instantiate the vararg-ctor inherited from PathArray.
Thus better be explicit and noisy...
After completing the self-contained UICoord data elements,
the next thing to consider might be how to resolve UI coordinates
against an actual window topology. We need to define a suitable
command-and-query interface in order to build and verify this
intricate resolution process separated from the actual UI code.
Explicitly assuming that those functions are called solely from IterAdapter
and that they are implemented in a typical standard style, we're able to elide
two redundant calls to the checkPoint() function. Since checkPoint typically performs
some non-trivial checks, this has the potential of a significant performance improvement
- we check (and throw ITER_EXHAUST) anyway from operator++, so we know that pos is valid
- the iterate() function ensures checkPoint is invoked right after iterNext,
and thus the typical standard implementation of iterNext need not do the same
...since that is what it meant to be.
To allow this chance, I've now added a default ctor to lib::Literal,
defaulting to the Symbol::EMPTY (the interned empty string)
The class Literal is used as a thin wrapper to mark the fact that
some string parameter or value is assumed to be given *literally*
For the contract this indicates
- that storage is somewhere
- storage is not owned and managed by Literal
- yet storage guaranteed to exist during the whole lifetime of the program
- Literal can not be altered
- Literal is transparently convertible to const char *
Currently I am in the course of building some path abstraction, and for that
task it makes sense to hold an array of Literals (instead of pointers), just
because it expresses the intent way more clear. I do not see anything in the
above mentioned contract to prohibit a default constructed Literal, with the
empty string being the most obvious choice.
Note: there is the class Symbol, which derives from Literal. Symbol takes
arbitrary strings, but *interns* them into a static symbol table.
...under the assumption that the content is normalised,
which means
- leading NULL is changed to Symbol::EMPTY
- missing elements in the middle are marked as "*"
- trailing NULL in extension storage is handled by adjusting nominal extension size
