...and write down some insights about the architecure
and design of tree binding and tree description related
to the TreeMutator.
When reading my notes from last year, it became clear
to me that the design of the TreeMutator has evolved
significantly, and became quite something different
than I'd imagined at start
now the full API for the "mutation primitives" is shaped.
Of course the actual implementation is missing, but that
should be low hanging fuit by now.
What still requires some thinking though is how to implement
the selector, so we'll actually get a onion shaped decorator
basically we'll establish a collaboration where both sides
know only the interface (contract) of the partner; a safe margin
for allocation size has to be established through metaprogramming (TODO)
...basically we've now the list mutation primitives working,
albeit in a test/dummy implementation only. Next steps will
be to integrate the assignment and sub scope primitives,
and then to re-do the same implementation respectively
for the case of mutating a standard collection of arbitrary type
now this feels like making progress again,
even when just writing stubs ;-)
Moreover, it became clear that the "typing" of typed child collections
will always be ad hoc, and thus needs to be ensured on a case by case
base. As a consequence, all mutation primitives must carry the
necessary information for the internal selector to decide if this
primitive is applicable to a given decorator layer. Because
otherwise it is not possible to uphold the concept of a single,
abstracted "source position", where in fact each typed sub-collection
of children (and thus each "onion layer" in the decorator chain)
maintains its own private position
after sleeping one night over the problem, this seems to be
the most natural solution, since the possibility of assignment
naturally arises from the fact that, for tree diff, we have
to distinguish between the *identity* of an element node and
its payload (which could be recursive). Thus, IFF the payoad
is an assignable value, why not allow to assign it. Doing so
elegnatly solves the problem with assignment of attributes
Signed-off-by: Ichthyostega <prg@ichthyostega.de>
This basically finishes definition of the fundamental
UI-Element and Bus protocol -- with one notable exception:
how to mutate elements by diff.
This will be the next topic to address
...and I made the decision *not* to consider any kind of
generic properties for now. YAGNI.
UI coding is notorious spaghetti code.
No point in fighting that, it is just the way it is,
because somewhere you're bound to get concrete, hands-on.
still TODO: the ability to use immutable types
within the command framework. In theory, this
shouldn't be had to implement, since we're creating
a new opaque value holder within the command registry
anyway, so it should be sufficient to refrain from
re-assigning a new value tuple. This is relevant,
since e.g. our time framework is built on immutable
value types.
as it turns out, this is a Bug in GCC 4.9 (resolved in 5.x)
See https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=63723
Problem is, GCC emits a warning on narrowing conversions,
while the standard actually disallows them when building
objects from brace-enclosed initialisers.
Unfortunately GCC also emits such a warning from within
a SFINAE context, instead of letting those spurious dangerous
cases fail. So we end up with additional visitor double dispatch
paths, and a lot of additional warnings.
Temporary solution is to hack a custom trait, which
explicitly declares some conversions paths as "narrowing".
Probably this can be implemented in a way more intelligent
way (using std::numeric_limits), but this doesn't seem
worth the effort, since the problem will go away through
compiler evolution eventually.
now we're able to construct suitable parameter values from the
arguments passed embedded in the GenNodes, as is demonstrated with the
EntryID<long> constructed from an ID-string. We really need a full-blown
double-dispatch, since the content type of the concrete GenNode is only
known at runtime (encoded in the RTTI)
There is still the problem with generating some spurions additional
conversion pathes, some of which are narrowing (and thus dangerous).
The copiler emits several warnings here, and all of them are justified.
E.g. it would be possible to pass an int64_t in the GenNode and initialise
a short from it. This might be convenient at times, but I tend rather to
be prohibitive here and thus consider to built in distinct limitations
on the allowed conversions.
not sure yet if any of this works, because the
technicalities of dealing with variadic types are
quite different to our LISP-style typelist processing.
The good news is that with variadic templates it is
indeed possible, to supply dynamically picked arguments
to another function taking arbitrary arguments.
This all relies on the feature to unpack argument packs,
and, more specifically, about the possiblity to "wrap"
this unpacking around interspersed function call syntax
template<size_t...i>
Xyz
do_something(MyTuple myTuple)
{
return Xyz (std::get<i> (myTuple) ... );
}
Here the '...' will be applied to the i... and then
the whole std::get-construct will be wrapped around
each element. Mind bogging, but very powerful
First part is to define the steps (the protocol) at the
model element level, which gets a command prepared and invoked.
Test fails still, because there is no actual argument binding
invoked in the TestNexus
the initial draft of this concept is in place now, and
the first round of unit tests pass. I've got some understanding
of the purpose of the interactions and involved elements
and I'm confident this design is evolving in a sane way.
Note: extensive documentation is in the TiddlyWiki,
here I've just pasted and reworded some paragraphs from there
and integrated them into the Doxygen docs
next step will be to rig the mock element and set up
and cover the basic / generic element behaviour
This changeset
- adapts the (planned) unit test to the semantic of
the EventLog, which is now fully implemented
- adjusts the function names on the public Tangible interface,
to be better in line with the naming convention of the
corrsponding operations on the UI-Bus:
* "mark" operations are towards the UI element
* "note" messages are from the UI element towards some
state manager, which can be reached via the bus
what you see here now is just the tip of the icebearg...
If we follow this route, the Lumiera UI will become way more
elaborate and responsive than average desktop applications
