WARNING: This interface is tentative and may change to a large extent from SmartEiffel 2.2 to SmartEiffel 2.3. INTERNALS serves as a gateway between the typed ideal world of Eiffel objects and the untyped physical world of raw memory, files on disks, streams on networks... All instances of INTERNALS must be of type TYPED_INTERNALS. Each INTERNALS object describes the physical structure of exactly one type. For instance, TYPED_INTERNALS[STRING] describes the physical structure of class STRING. Optionally, an object of an INTERNAL's associated type can be attached to that INTERNAL. The INTERNAL can then be used to inspect and change the values of the attributes of the attached object. For instance, a STRING could be attached to a TYPED_INTERNALS[STRING]. The TYPED_INTERNALS[STRING] could then be used to get or set this STRING's attributes. This class is meant as a very basic building block. Please read the following advice to use INTERNALS wisely: 1. Don't use INTERNALS 2. If rule 1. is unapplicable, use INTERNALS to build a higher-level abstraction, and use that abstraction in your -- application. You really don't want INTERNALS scattered around your -- application code. |
Getting information about the described object's type