Re: Introspector & Treecc (was: [DotGNU]Licence question about GNU and GCC)

[James Michael DuPont]

Rhys, 
We are moving along I would say! 

> That would be great.  The trick is finding the right
> "syntactic/semantic style" to use to make it work
> well with the rest of treecc.  Aspect-orientation is
> tricky: it's very easy to fall back to OO thinking.
> I'm definitely open to suggestions.

Please excuse my many metas in the following block :
The introspector uses (meta-meta)reflection on the
(meta)tree level. The trees are a description of the
code, therefore meta. The meta information about the
tree is a description of the description, therefore
meta-meta.

Each meta-tree node type knows what its fields are,
thier types and is's parent classes. 
(This is happening in the treecc level I presume.)

The the generation of the persistence and
serialisation methods, sql tables and such is easy
given this tree-meta reflection, a tree node can
access it's needed information at the time of dealing
with tree instances, or the code can be generated
statically (like a database schema).

It is relativly simple to create a simple xml
serialisation given a easy to use meta model.


> > > There are also difficult issues: how to 
> Since both pnet and gcc are part of the GNU Project,
> and Mono is not, it would be advisable to do this
> using
> pnet components where possible.  
Please excuse my ignorance about the pnet,
there is no dis intended!
I will have to review the entire project in detail.

I found in the table of contents of the 
microsoft IL assembler some interesting items:
"Signature Type Specifications"
"    Native Type Declarations"
Are these function and data types for c? Can I
represent  the function type  of "printf" in IL?

>Metadata support
> is core to pnet, and has been present since day 1.
Great! I will have to review the sources for that over
the weekend. Again I have not gotten that far yet. I
am preparing for a two week vacation and have a lot of
work to do for my day job. Hacking around on these
trees is what I do for fun :).
 
> Pnet's metadata system represents everything using
> an interlinked series of data structures like
> ILClass,
> ILField, ILMethod, etc.  
I will look into them pronto!

> Normally these structures are created at 
> runtime,