[C++-sig] boost::any

[David Abrahams]

Jens Finkhäuser <jens at unwesen.de> writes:

> Hi again!
>
>> Which is why my idea was to provide such a converter for boost::any.
>> But I don't know if a 'generic' converter (ie using automaticaly the
>> specialised ones) is possible.
>   Well, you could build a converter that converts boost::any to some
> Python type, but inside that converter you would have to check the
> typeid of the held object to decide what kind of Python object to
> convert to. And you'd have to adapt that converter to every type of
> object you later decide to put into that boost::any.
>   As far as I recall, boost::python uses templates to let some of those
> decisions happen at compile time. For that, you need distinct C++ types
> that map to corresponding Python types, and as boost::any can hold,
> well, any type you can't use that technique.
>
>> Yes, but as far as I understand, the type_id of the c++ types is used to
>> determine how to convert them from/to python objects. And this type_id
>> being available on boost::any, I am hoping that implementing such
>> converters is possible (if not easy enough for me).
>   see above.
>
>> It's an easy workaround. It seems to me that it's almost equivalent as to
>> hand-code a converter for boost::any which knows a finished set of types.
>> Does it make sense ?
>   I think it does ;)
>   The difference is, as I tried to point out above, that a hand-coded
> converter for boost::any moves some decisions to run-time which can be
> handled at compile-time. 

Few conversion decisions are actually handled at compile-time in
Boost.Python, except as an optimization.  You can look up the to/from
python converters for any type by typeid.  But you'll have to crawl
about in the registry code; there's no public interface for doing this.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
www.boost-consulting.com