This is an important step towards completing #487, but a few more things are needed for this:
Being able to specify int[] as an explicit type specifier. Right now, only implicitly typed int arrays are supported.
Being able to use this for other data types like long[], double[] and string[].
As for the underlying perlang::IntArray class, what I am aiming for here is something a bit more high-level than traditional C-style int[] arrays. They are nice in the sense of being "low overhead" but are also prone to all kinds of C-style memory issues (heap overflow, most notably). Perlang arrays will be more akin to Java or C#-style arrays, which are inherently "safe by design". It should be more or less impossible to use a Perlang array in such a way as to cause the program to crash. Because we don't have a JVM or MSIL interpreter to help us with this, we have to implement the boundary checks on our own.
At the moment, those boundary checks throw (C++) exceptions. We could consider adding more "try"-oriented methods too, like try_get(index, default_value) or even try_get(index, () -> default_value) if we want to be more fancy. Either way, the point is to avoid exceptions and let the caller (by returning a bool) check if the operation was successful or not by different, sometimes more appropriate means than exceptions.
This is an important step towards completing #487, but a few more things are needed for this:
int[]as an explicit type specifier. Right now, only implicitly typedintarrays are supported.long[],double[]andstring[].As for the underlying
perlang::IntArrayclass, what I am aiming for here is something a bit more high-level than traditional C-styleint[]arrays. They are nice in the sense of being "low overhead" but are also prone to all kinds of C-style memory issues (heap overflow, most notably). Perlang arrays will be more akin to Java or C#-style arrays, which are inherently "safe by design". It should be more or less impossible to use a Perlang array in such a way as to cause the program to crash. Because we don't have a JVM or MSIL interpreter to help us with this, we have to implement the boundary checks on our own.At the moment, those boundary checks throw (C++) exceptions. We could consider adding more "try"-oriented methods too, like
try_get(index, default_value)or eventry_get(index, () -> default_value)if we want to be more fancy. Either way, the point is to avoid exceptions and let the caller (by returning abool) check if the operation was successful or not by different, sometimes more appropriate means than exceptions.