Re: [boost] Reflection Framework [was Serialization and Reflection]

From: David Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-12-18 20:23:14

Jeremy Maitin-Shepard <jbms_at_[hidden]> writes:

> On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 07:00:56PM -0500, David Abrahams wrote:
>> FWIW, I don't think it would be smart to put *too* many eggs in this
>> basket.  Because XTI is based on debug symbol information, it is
>> neccessarily limited in certain ways that a full-compiler-based
>> solution is not.  For example, I'm fairly certain that some details
>> unneccessary for debugging like access control
>> (public/private/protected) are dropped.
>
> For fields, I do not think it is particularly useful to provide access
> exclusively to the actual instance variables.  It seems, however, that
> access control specifiers of public, private, and protected are not
> useful, however, because first of all, it seems that it would be
> nearly impossible to enforce such control, and also I do not see how
> it would be useful.  There should really be no need to publish
> anything but public fields.

The point is that (IIRC) XTI cannot distinguish, so if you want to do
something based on just public parts of an interface, you may be
out-of-luck.  Further, if you automatically generate code based on XTI
information, you might find that the code doesn't compile because it
violates access control.

-- 
                       David Abrahams
   dave_at_[hidden] * http://www.boost-consulting.com
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