On Sun, 18 Oct 2009 17:25:47 +0200 Paolo Bonzini <bonz...@gnu.org> wrote:
> > >> I'd strongly suggest making the JSON encoder live outside of QObject. > >> There are many possible ways to represent a QObject. Think of JSON as a > >> view of the QObject model. The human monitor mode representation is a > >> different view. > > My rationale was that since QObject is tailored over JSON, we might as > well declare JSON to be "the" preferred view of the QObject model. Maybe this makes sense today as the Monitor is the only heavy user of QObjects, but I don't think we should count on that. As things evolve, I believe more subsystems will start using QObjects and any "particular" view of it will make little sense. To be honest I don't know if this is good, I fear we will end up enhancing QObjects to the extreme to do OOP in QEMU... > The human monitor representation would be provided by qstring_format in > my patches (and a QError method would call qstring_format in the > appropriate way, returning a C string with the result). > > I think the different opinions is also due to different background; mine > is in Smalltalk where class extensions---aka monkeypatching---are done > in a different style than for example in Python. Adding a "write as > escaped JSON" method to QString would be akin to monkeypatching. True. > > I agree. > > > > QObject's methods should only be used/needed by the object layer itself, > > if the problem at hand handles high level data types (QInt, QDict, etc) > > then we need a new type. > > > > The right way to have what Paolo is suggesting, would be to have a > > toString() method in the object layer and allow it to be overridden. > > That's exactly what I did in my patches, except I called it encode_json > rather than toString. Okay, I just took a quick look at them and am looking at Anthony's right now. Anyway, my brainstorm on this would be to have to_string() and have default methods on all types to return a simple string representation. The QJson type could override to_string() if needed, this way specific json bits stays inside the json module. But I see that Anthony has added a qjson type already..
