These are used to provide a mechanism for an application to have special access to individual variables allowing for transparent control of data and lazy updating of information. The mechanism provides three callbacks: 'get', 'set', and 'cleanup'. It also provides a means of tagging data to variables in a similar fashion of objects with an ->odata pointer that is not touched by ferite. Please see include/ferite/fstructs.h for the actual structures used.
How They Work
Get
When a variable is accessed in ferite either to just read or assign - it is 'gotten'. This means that in both of the statements below, the variable 'foo' it 'gotten'.
x = bar.foo;
bar.foo = 2 x;
When a variable is 'gotten', and it has accessors on it, the 'get' method will be run on it. This will pass the script and the variable to the method. The method can then modify the variable as it wants, and then return. It does not return the variable.
The get function has the prototype:
void get( FeriteScript *script, FeriteVariable *var )
Set
When a variable is assigned to [after it has been gotten], it will have the 'set' method called on it, this gets passed the script, the variable and the variable that is to be assigned to it [known as RHS var]. Note: ferite will already have updated the variable with the RHS var. This means that the programmer need only to the minial amount of work. You must not modify the rhs variable, it is only given to you so that you can do your own special assignment if you _have_ to. I warn against it greatly.
The set function has the prototype:
void set( FeriteScript *script, FeriteVariable *lhs, FeriteVariable *rhs )
Cleanup
The final mechanism is for cleaning up the ->odata information. It simply calls the cleanup function with the script and the ->odata pointer so it can be cleaned up.
The cleanup function has the prototype:
void cleanup( FeriteScript *script, void *odata );
You need not register all of these. To create the structures on a variable call the function:
void ferite_create_variable_accessors( FeriteScript *script, FeriteVariable *var, void *get, void *set, void *cleanup, void *odata )
Where 'var' is the variable to attach to, 'get', 'set' and 'cleanup' are pointers to the functions, and odata is the initial odata. You can pass the function NULL's to just not have them setup.
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