[kepler-dev] Token.toString method(s)

[Christopher Brooks]

Hi Dan,
I'm on vacation, but I meditated on nil tokens while in the Barcelona 
airport.

The relationship between nil tokens and type is a little fuzzy to me.  It 
seems that nil
tokens can really be of any type.  We need a way to create a nil token and 
use that token
in an expression and have the expression type check properly.  In 
particular, if we
have an array of doubles and one element is nil, we want to have a nil token 
that will properly
type check.  Tokens are immutable so I think we also need a way to create 
nil tokens by
construction.  This can get a little tricky.  I see two possible ways of 
creating nil tokens:
1) Have a XXXToken(boolean) constructor that would set whether the token was 
nil
or not.  This is not so great for BooleanToken() though.
2) Have a XXXToken(Object) constructor where if the Object parameter is 
null, then the
token is nil.  If the Object parameter is non-null, then some tokens 
(AWTImage) could do
instanceof and try to use the parameter if it was the right type.   Perhaps 
Some tokens would just
throw an exception if the perameter was non-null though.

I'm leaning towards #2.  What do you think?

Also, yes, I agree, we need to extend the toString() methods to handle nil 
tokens.  Edward
was not that opposed to modifying the Token classes to properly handle nil 
tokens (Edward,
correct me if I've been drinking to much Rioja and heard you wrong.)  We 
should try to
make the checks for nil tokens very efficient though.

Working on the nil token is probably at the top of my todo list, so I'll be 
spending some time on it.

_Christopher
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dan Higgins" <higgins at nceas.ucsb.edu>
To: "Christopher Brooks" <cxh at eecs.berkeley.edu>; 
<Kepler-dev at ecoinformatics.org>
Sent: Friday, February 17, 2006 9:58 AM
Subject: Token.toString method(s)


> Hi Christopher,
>
>    Jing and I were looking over the Ptolemy code for the Token class. The 
> 'toString' method does indeed return "nil" when there is a missing value. 
> However, when you look at the code for derived token classes like IntToken 
> or DoubleToken, each has its own version of 'toString' that overrides the 
> Token base class. Don't we need to change the 'toString' method in all the 
> derived classes to return 'nil' when the token is set to that? [If not, it 
> makes the RExpression actor conversion much more difficult, especially for 
> arrays of tokens.]
>
> Dan
>
> -- 
> *******************************************************************
> Dan Higgins                                  higgins at nceas.ucsb.edu
> http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Ph: 805-893-5127
> National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) Marine 
> Science Building - Room 3405
> Santa Barbara, CA 93195
> *******************************************************************
>
>
>