Protocols and implicit conversions

Ruby IronRuby
1

I wanted to call out a fairly simple pattern that shows up in our
libraries that folks largely haven’t caught onto in the patches that
they’ve been submitting:

Wayne recently submitted a patch for exist? and exists? which fixes bug
#19626:

[RubyMethod(“exist?”, RubyMethodAttributes.PublicSingleton)]
[RubyMethod(“exists?”, RubyMethodAttributes.PublicSingleton)]
public static bool Exists(object self/!/, MutableString/!/ path) {
return File.Exists(path.ToString()) ||
Directory.Exists(path.ToString());
}

While this works fine, if you pass it legal arguments, it blows up when
the invariants are broken (eg path == null). You can see it blow up when
you run the specs for this method from the command line via:

rake spec file exist dox

To make this patch complete, you’ll need to add an overload that accepts
a nullable object parameter, and add a [NotNull] attribute to the
previous overload:

[RubyMethod(“exist?”, RubyMethodAttributes.PublicSingleton)]
[RubyMethod(“exists?”, RubyMethodAttributes.PublicSingleton)]
public static bool Exists(object self/!/, [NotNull]MutableString/!/
path) {
return File.Exists(path.ToString()) ||
Directory.Exists(path.ToString());
}

[RubyMethod(“exist?”, RubyMethodAttributes.PublicSingleton)]
[RubyMethod(“exists?”, RubyMethodAttributes.PublicSingleton)]
public static bool Exists(CodeContext/!/ context, object self/!/,
object path) {
return Exists(self, Protocols.CastToString(context, path));
}

Notice how the null case is taken care of by Protocols.CastToString().
It also will handle the case where the user passes a string that can
‘act like’ a string by implementing to_str. This is an extremely
common case in the Ruby libraries.

The [NotNull] attribute is used by the binder to ensure that a null is
never passed as a parameter to the first overload, but instead directs
the caller to the second overload. This is the case which correctly
handles null (and is also reflected by the fact that we are declaring
via comments that path is nullable eg missing the spec# bang).

Let me know if this isn’t clear or needs some further clarification.

Thanks!
-John

2

Just typo:
public static bool Exists(object self/!/, …

should be

public static bool Exists(object/!/ self, …

/!/ is a type modifier.

Anyway, note that [NotNull] and /!/ are two semantically different
things.
The attribute is directing the overload resolution to select a different
overload if the argument is null.
The non-null contract /!/ is declaring that the method expects the
argument not to be null, otherwise an exception is thrown. Seems to be
similar, but consider this case:

[RubyMethod(“eval”)]
public static object Evaluate(CodeContext/!/ context, object self,
[NotNull]MutableString/!/ code, [Optional]Binding binding,
[Optional, NotNull]MutableString file) { … }

The last parameter is Optional and NotNull. That means, if I pass null
as 5th argument, this overload is not applicable. If I call this method
only with 4 arguments, this overload is selected (provided that other
arguments match the parameters) and ‘file’ parameter is assigned null.
Therefore this parameter is not marked by /!/. Or I can just call it
with 5 arguments, 5th being a string.

Another difference is that the contract is not available at run-time.
It’s only used by tools that recognizes it (Spec#).

Tomas