turns out this is a tricky situation.
We want to accept pretty mutch everything, yet we want to get a grip
on anything object-like, so to reveal available RTTI information.
Now, given the way C++ template substitution works, the 'TY const&' overload
wins with only a few exceptions. The reason is, C++ invokes most functions
passing the concrete argument as reference, unless this is not possible,
because the concrete artument is a rvalue. The automatic reduction of
reference expressions does the rest. Consequently the overload with 'const&'
turns out to be the best match even when we invoke the function with a
pointer expression, which would then be made into a pointer-to-a pointer
by our forward call.
There are two remedies for this dilemma:
- make the second overload just typeStr (TY&)
- explicitly remove the second overload for pointers
The first solution unfortunately would rule out passing of anonymous
objects like concatenated strings; in fact it would rule out passing
rvalues as such. While the second solution, chosen here, works really
for everything, and also has the nice side effect of stripping away
any const, pointer and reference adornements elegantly before we
even start to analyse the type.
The only downside of this solution is that it looks intimidating
to the casual reader. Well, I'd say, get used to it.
over time, we got quite a jungle with all those
shome-me-the-type-of helper functions.
Reduced and unified all those into
- typeString : a human readable, slightly simplified full type
- typeSymbol : a single word identifier, extracted lexically from the type
note: this changeset causes a lot of tests to break,
since we're using unmangeled type-IDs pretty much everywhere now.
Beore fixing those, I'll have to implement a better simplification
scheme for the "human readable" type names....
...based on all the clean-up and reorganisation done thus far,
we're now able to rebuild the util::str in a more direct and
sane way, and thus to disentangle the header inclusion problem.
use a shortened display, showing only the last 4 bytes for diagnostics
since we're typically only interested in spotting "same" and "different",
while the full memory address is irrelevant
No more fiddling with printf just to show a number reliably!
simple functions to pretty-print addresses,
doubles and floats (fixed-point, with rounding).
Also make all these basic formatting helpers noexcept
- simple function to pick up the mangled type
- pretty-printing is implemented in format-obj.cpp
- also move the demangleCxx()-Function to that location,
it starts to be used for real, outside the test framework
this is a stripped-down and very leightweight variant
of the well-known enable_if metaprogramming trick.
Providing this standard variant in a header with minimal
dependencies will allow us to phase out boost inclusions
from many further headers. As a plus, our own variant
is written such as to be more conciese in usage
(no "typename" and no acces of an embedded "::type" menber)
now we use boost::format through our own front-end util::_Fmt
solely, which both helps to reduce compilation time and code size,
and gives us a direct string conversion, which automatically
uses any custom operator string() available on arguments.
While desirable as such, I did this conversion now, since
it allows us to get rid of boost::str, which in turn helps
to drill down any remaning uses of our own util::str
using our util::_Fmt front-end helps to reduce the code size,
since all usages rely on a single inclusion of boost::format
including boost::format via header can cause quite some code bloat
NOTE: partial solution, still some further includes to reorganise
