Re: OOP and load/save

[John W. Eaton]

On 23-Apr-2009, Judd Storrs wrote:

| Warning: Fields of object 'bar' do not match the current constructor
|          definition for class 'Foo'.  The object has been converted
|          to a structure.

OK.  We can probably deal with most of these things, but given the
current design of the load function for Octave's binary, ascii, or hdf
formats, I don't see how we can easily make load convert the result to
a structure.  The reason is that we do this:

  read the type information from the file (e.g., "class")

  create an object of the specified type  (an octave_class object)

  ask the created object to read the rest of the description from the
  file and construct itself by filling in the missing bits

so that saving and loading may be easily extended to user-defined data
types defined in C++ classes that are loaded at run time.

I think this means that some semi-major surgery might be required to
allow conversion to a structure when loading these file types.

jwe