our formatting helper for diagnostics output,
which is primarily used in the unit-tests,
first tries to invoke a custom string conversion.
If that is not possible, it falls back to printing
the demangled type name of the object in question.
With just a minor change we're able to evaluate RTTI here
and print the actual type name, instead of the static
supertype the compiler sees on invocation. We just rely
on the typeid(obj) built-in function.
The only catch is we have to strip the " const*" suffix
(and no, it is not possible to do that on metaprogramming
level, due to the special situation where we have a void*)
This also prompted me to write some util functions for
this often encountered task to check / remove a prefix or suffix
Hopefully I've got those functions correct and safe....
OMG, what was all this about?
OK... this cant possibly work this way.
At least we need to trim after splitting the attributes.
But this is not enough, we want the value, which implies
to make the type flexible (since we cant return a const& to
a substring extracted on-the-fly)
right now we have to defeat an unfortunate static assertion in
the standard library, which is expected to go away in the future.
We use a hack to hijack the problematic definition with the preprocessor,
which requires our header to be first.