Re: "gimple-classes-v2-option-3" git branch committed to svn trunk as r217787

[Michael Matz <matz at suse dot de>]

Hi,

On Thu, 20 Nov 2014, Richard Biener wrote:

> > I don't think this API will make the non-C++-fans happier; I think the
> > objection to the work I just merged is that it's adding more C++ than
> > those people are comfortable with.
> 
> How so?  It's already super-ugly in those views.  We decided to get C++.
> Now we have it.

And?  Nobody says we can't have nice looking code even with C++.

> Now please make it AT LEAST CONSISTENT.

True.

> > I suspect that any API which requires the of < > characters within the 
> > implementation of a gimple pass to mean a template is going to give 
> > those less happy with C++ a visceral "ugh" reaction.  I wonder if 
> > there's a way to spell these things that's concise and which doesn't 
> > involve <> ?
> 
> Only if you drop as_a/is_a/dyn_cast everywhere.

Oh god, yes.  Please!  IMHO they don't accomplish much, but make code 
harder to visually parse.  They don't accomplish much because you 
have to write the snippets that check validity of conversions anyway, so 
they can just as well be written as proper methods or global functions, or 
even just conversion operators.  Nothing forces us to implement these 
snippets as noisy template specializations like:

  template <>
  template <>
  inline bool
  is_a_helper <cgraph_node *>::test (symtab_node *p)
  {
    return p->type == SYMTAB_FUNCTION;
  }

instead of the more mundane means.  And once you have those snippets as 
normal functions, you can just as well call them like they are functions, 
making the using side of those conversion also look nicer.


Ciao,
Michael.