[chuck-users] Doing something to all members of a class?

[Spencer Salazar]

Scott/David/all,

On Mar 13, 2007, at 9:49 PM, Scott Wheeler wrote:

> The only way I saw to work around this was creating another class  
> as an array handle and using that by reference.

Another potential workaround for this bug would be to declare an  
empty array, which allocates no memory for array elements, is "sort  
of" like an array reference, and manages to get around the static  
data member bug.  You can then to chuck a new array to it to  
initialize it.  E.g.,

int values[20] @=> Foo.values;
class Foo
{
     static int values[];
     // ...
}

One technique I like is to initialize static class data at the  
beginning of the file containing the class definition.  The  
advantages of this approach are that the initialization is guaranteed  
to be executed only once, is guaranteed to be executed if no fatal  
errors occur during the initialization, is executed before anything  
else can use it (though Im not positive this is guaranteed), and  
doesn't require an instance of the class to have already been  
created.  If the class definition is at the top of the file, it  
sometimes makes sense to put the initialization code immediately  
after the class definition, which is functionally the same but might  
read a little better.

> And unlike other objects, it seems that you can't assign an array  
> to an Object.  (i.e. "new int[20] @=> Object foo;" doesn't work)

This now works as of the current release candidate!  However, I dont  
think there is a way to get the array data out of an object stored in  
an Object reference (foo $ int[] doesn't work).

spencer