🚀 go-pugleaf

wmm@world.std.com (William M Miller) writes:

>In article <1992Jul23.024159.18039@microsoft.com>, Jim Adcock writes:
>> No circumlocution is necessary because of "implied this."
>
>No circumlocution is needed in the smart reference's member functions,
>agreed, but that was not the context I was describing.  If there is a
>"metaoperation" to be performed on the smart reference itself, the
>circumlocation *is* necessary.  Such metaoperations might include
>status queries, cache invalidation, network rerouting, etc.

True.

However in general the idea with smart references is that they be "just like"
real references, so that most of the code doesn't need to tell the difference.
One would expect therefore that most of the code would not need to access
such meta-operations.

There are also several ways of hiding away the circumlocution, if it still
bothers you (variations on the usual macro-hackery). One way would be to
use a functional syntax for the meta-operations:

	SmartRef r;
	invalidate_cache(r);
	query_status(r);

Alternatively you could define one function on smartrefs that returns
a smartref-controller:

	Smartref r;
	control(r).invalidate_cache();
	control(r).query_status();

This looks like a nice way of doing it to me, since it visually flags
the use of meta-operations, while still allowing the normal "." syntax.

[I've left the implementation details unstated; perhaps someone with a little
time to spare might like to fill them in.]
-- 
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