search

TheToolsmiths / ddl

Data Definition Language for Game Development Tools
MIT License
4 stars 3 forks source link

Support pointers and\or references #3

Open flaxed opened 5 years ago

flaxed commented 5 years ago

The need for a first-class representation of pointers and\or references is evident from discussions on slack.

However a carbon copy from C should be avoided, since it does not map well to other languages, like C# where how its stored or referenced depends on the type not the field.

Might be better to keep it as a single keyword meaning an object stored somewhere else.

leiradel commented 5 years ago

We could annotate the type i.e. [[reference]].

leiradel commented 5 years ago

On a second thought, references are specific to some programming languages. Maybe we should be more specific in what we want and let the code generator implement it appropriately for the target language?

I.e. if the purpose of having a reference field is to be able to make it null, maybe a [[nullable]] annotation is both more clear and language agnostic.