From: Anthony Williams (anthony.williamsNOSPAM_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-11-22 08:30:51
David Abrahams writes:
> Anthony Williams <anthony.williamsNOSPAM_at_[hidden]> writes:
>
> > David Abrahams writes:
> > >
> > > Do we have any precedent for ways to find out what the arity and
> > > argument types of an arbitrary function object is (I'm not talking
> > > about function pointers, here, but "functors")?
> >
> > Given that a functor might support more than one argument set, the only way I
> > can think of is to say "do you support this argument set?" rather than "what
> > argument set do you accept?"; in which case you can use the mechanism
> > implemented in boost.lambda, and in my function composition library, to deduce
> > the return type --- have a member template that takes a typelist representing the
> > arguments you wish to pass, and returns the corresponding return type where
> > that argument set is valid, or something else (such as invalid_argument_set)
> > where it isn't (assuming you want to do something else in the case where it
> > isn't, rather than just abort compilation)
> >
> > Does this give you what you want?
>
> No, the inputs are fully-polymorphic Python objects. If I knew what
> "arguments I wish to pass", I'd be all set. I'm only interested in the
> cases where that's deducible from the function object. For the other
> cases, the user can pass me a type sequence directly.
OK, so you have a set of "any" objects, and a functor, and you want to know
what types to extract from your "any" objects to pass as arguments to the
functor?
Well, given that you can only work with a functor of defined arity and
argument types for that information to be available at all, you could just use
the type of Functor::operator() to determine the required information:
struct get_member_func_info;
template<typename Functor,typename Res,typename Arg1>
struct get_member_func_info<Res (Functor::*)(Arg1)>
{
enum {arity=1};
typedef Arg1 arg1_type;
};
template<typename Functor,typename Res,typename Arg1,typename Arg2>
struct get_member_func_info<Res (Functor::*)(Arg1,Arg2)>
{
enum {arity=2};
typedef Arg1 arg1_type;
typedef Arg2 arg2_type;
};
not forgetting to handle const/volatile/const volatile member functions too,
then just use
get_member_func_info<&MyFunctor::operator()>::arity, ::arg1_type, ::arg2_type,
etc.
Of course, it won't work if operator() is overloaded, but if there's a defined
arity and argument type set, then you should only be talking about
cv-qualification, and it strikes me as bad design to have a member function
overloaded exclusively on cv-qualification --- this implies that the constness
of the object affects its behaviour.
Anthony
-- Anthony Williams Senior Software Engineer, Beran Instruments Ltd. Remove NOSPAM when replying, for timely response.