Is there any problems with naming a local variable `property`? - c++

I'm trying to refactor a local variable in CLion to name it property but it won't actually let me. There's no error when I do it myself but the refactoring tool is a bit less tedious.
Renaming property__ to property
Is this a bug from CLion or there's actually a reason it doesn't want me to do that ? I imagine that if it's not a bug, it might be entering in conflict with something else making it safer for me to use another name.
PS: To curious wondering I need to call a variable something as generic as property, I'm looping through XML attributes and the XML library I'm using call that properties (I'm not sure why).
for(c_xml_config::nodeProperty property : xmlModule.properties)
{
//Lots of this calling this variable making it tedious to rename at hand...
}

In plain C++ property is not reserved, so yes you can use it.
It appears to be a keyword in a Microsoft C++ extension.

Related

Adding Custom c++ function in chromium and call them in browser

I am trying to write custom function in bootstrapper.cc under v8/src/init.
int helloworld(){
return 0;
}
When it try to call it from chromium console, it throws undefined.
Look around bootstrapper.cc to see how other built-in functions are installed. Examples you could look at include Array and DataView (or any other, really).
There is no way to simply define a C++ function of a given name and have that show up in JavaScript. Instead, you have to define a property on the global object; and the function itself needs to have the right calling convention, and process its parameters / prepare its return value appropriately so that it can be called from JavaScript. You can't just take or return an int.
If you find it inconvenient to work with C++, an alternative might be to develop a Chrome extension, which would allow you to use JavaScript for the implementation, and also remove the need to compile/maintain/update your own build (which is a lot of work!). There is no existing guide for how to extend V8 in the way you're asking, because that approach is so much work that we don't recommend doing it like this (though of course it is possible -- you just have to read enough of the existing C++ source to understand how it's done).

Tools to refactor names of types, functions and variables?

struct Foo{
Bar get(){
}
}
auto f = Foo();
f.get();
For example you decide that get was a very poor choice for a name but you have already used it in many different files and manually changing ever occurrence is very annoying.
You also can't really make a global substitution because other types may also have a method called get.
Is there anything for D to help refactor names for types, functions, variables etc?
Here's how I do it:
Change the name in the definition
Recompile
Go to the first error line reported and replace old with new
Goto 2
That's semi-manual, but I find it to be pretty easy and it goes quickly because the compiler error message will bring you right to where you need to be, and most editors can read those error messages well enough to dump you on the correct line, then it is a simple matter of telling it to repeat the last replacement again. (In my vim setup with my hotkeys, I hit F4 for next error message, then dot for repeat last change until it is done. Even a function with a hundred uses can be changed reliably* in a couple minutes.)
You could probably write a script that handles 90% of cases automatically too by just looking for ": Error: " in the compiler's output, extracting the file/line number, and running a plain text replace there. If the word shows up only once and outside a string literal, you can automatically replace it, and if not, ask the user to handle the remaining 10% of cases manually.
But I think it is easy enough to do with my editor hotkeys that I've never bothered trying to script it.
The one case this doesn't catch is if there's another function with the same name that might still compile. That should never happen if you do this change in isolation, because an ambiguous name wouldn't compile without it.
In that case, you could probably do a three-step compiler-assisted change:
Make sure your code compiles before. Then add #disable to the thing you want to rename.
Compile. Every place it complains about it being unusable for being disabled, do the find/replace.
Remove #disable and rename the definition. Recompile again to make sure there's nothing you missed like child classes (the compiler will then complain "method foo does not override any function" so they stand right out too.
So yeah, it isn't fully automated, but just changing it and having the compiler errors help find what's left is good enough for me.
Some limited refactoring support can be found in major IDE plugins like Mono-D or VisualD. I remember that Brian Schott had plans to add similar functionality to his dfix tool by adding dependency on dsymbol but it doesn't seem implemented yet.
Not, however, that all such options are indeed of a very limited robustness right now. This is because figuring out the fully qualified name of any given symbol is very complex task in D, one that requires full semantics analysis to be done 100% correctly. Think about local imports, templates, function overloading, mixins and how it all affects identifying the symbol.
In the long run it is quite certain that we need to wait before reference D compiler frontend becomes available as a library to implement such refactoring tool in clean and truly reliable way.
A good find all feature can be better than a bad refactoring which, as mentioned previously, requires semantic.
Personally I have a find all feature in Coedit which displays the context of a match and works on all the project sources.
It's fast to process the results.

Changing global variable names

I working on a huge code base written many years ago. We're trying to implement multi-threading and I'm incharge of cleaning up global variables (sigh!)
My strategy is to move all global variables to a class, and then individual threads will use instances of that class and the globals will be accessed through class instance and -> operator.
In first go, I've compiled a list of global variables using nm by finding B and D group object names. The list is not complete, and incase of static variables, I don't get file and line number info.
The second stage is even more messy, I've to replace all globals in the code base with classinstance->global_name pattern. I'm using cscope Change text string for this. The problem is that in case of some globals, their name is also being used locally inside functions, and thus cscope is replacing them as well.
Any other way to go about it? Any strategies, or help please!
just some suggestions, from my experience:
use eclipse: the C++ indexer is very good, and when dealing with a large project I find it very useful to track variables. shift+ctrl+g (I have forgotten how to access to it from menus!) let you search all the references, ctrl+alt+h (open call hierarchy) the caller-callee trees...
use eclipse: it has good refactoring tools, that is able to rename a variable without touching same-name-different-scope variables. (it often fails in case there are templates involved. I find it good, better than visual studio 2008 counterpart).
use eclipse: I know, it get some time to get started with it, but after you get it, it's very powerful. It can deal easily with the existing makefile based project (file -> new -> project -> makefile project with existing code).
I would consider not to use class members, but accessors: it's possibile that some of them will be shared among threads, and need some locking in order to be properly used. So I would prefer: classinstance->get_global_name()
As a final note, I don't know whether using the eclipse indexer at command-line would be helpful for your task. You can find some examples googling for it.
This question/answer can give you some more hints: any C/C++ refactoring tool based on libclang? (even simplest "toy example" ). In particular I do quote "...C++ is a bitch of a language to transform"
Halfway there: if a function uses a local name that hides the global name, the object file won't have an undefined symbol. nm can show you those undefined symbols, and then you know in which files you must replace at least some instances of that name.
However, you still have a problem in the rare cases that a file uses both the global name and in another function hides the global name. I'm not sure if this can be resolved with --ffunction-sections; but I think so: nm can show the section and thus you'll see the undefined symbols used in foo() appear in section .text.foo.

isDefined function?

In C++ is there any function that returns "true" when the variable is defined or false in vice versa. Something like this:
bool isDefined(string varName)
{
if (a variable called "varName" is defined)
return true;
else
return false;
}
C++ is not a dynamic language. Which means, that the answer is no. You know this at compile time, not runtime.
There is no such a thing in runtime as it doesn't make sense in a non-dynamic language as C++.
However you can use it inside a sizeof to test if it exists on compile time without side-effects.
(void)sizeof(variable);
That will stop compilation if var doesn't exist.
As already stated, the C++ runtime system does not support the querying of whether or not a variable is declared or not. In general a C++ binary doesn't contain information on variable symbols or their mappings to their location. Technically, this information would be available in a binary compiled with debugging information, and you could certainly query the debugging information to see if a variable name is present at a given location in code, but it would be a dirty hack at best (If you're curious to see what it might look at, I posted a terrible snippet # Call a function named in a string variable in C which calls a C function by a string using the DWARF debugging information. Doing something like this is not advised)
Microsoft has two extensions to C++ named: __if_exists and __if_not_exists. They can be useful in some cases, but they don't take string arguments.
If you really need such a functionality you can add all your variables to a set and then query that set for variable existance.
Already mentioned that C++ doesn't provide such facility.
On the other hand there are cases where the OS implement mechanisms close to isDefined(),
like the GetProcAddress Function, on Windows.
No. It's not like you have a runtime system around C++ which keeps remembers variables with names in some sort of table (meta data) and lets you access a variable through a dynamically generated string. If you want this, you have to build it yourself, for example using a std::map that maps strings to some objects.
Some compile-time mechanism would fit into the language. But I don't think that it would be any useful.
In order to achieve this first you need to implement a dynamic variable handling system, or at least find some on the internet. As previously mentioned the C++ is designed to be a native language so there are no built-in facilities to do this.
What I can suggest for the most easy solution to create a std::map with string keys storing global variables of interest with a boost::any, wxVariant or something similar, and store your variables in this map. You can make your life a bit easier with a little preprocessor directive to define a variables by their name, so you don't need to retype the name of the variable twice. Also, to make life easier I suggest to create a little inline function which access this variable map, and checks if the given string key is contained by the map.
There are implementation such a functionality in many places, the runtime property handling systems are available in different fashion, but if you need just this functionality I suggest to implement by yourself, because most of these solutions are quite general what you probably don't need.
You can make such function, but it wouldn't operate strings. You would have to send variable name. Such a function would try to add 0 to the variable. If it doesn't exists, an error would occur, so you might want to try to make exception handling with try...throw...catch . But because I'm on the phone, I don't know if this wouldn't throw an error anyways when trying to send non-existing variable to the function...

Counterpart of PHP's isset() in C/C++

PHP has a very nice function, isset($variableName). It checks if $variableName is already defined in the program or not.
Can we build similar feature for C/C++ (some kind of symbol table lookup)?
I'm a C++ guy, but I remember in PHP isset is used to check if a variable contains a value when passed in through a get/post request (I'm sure there are other uses, but that's a common one I believe).
You don't really have dynamic typing in C++. So you can't suddenly use a variable name that you haven't previously explicitly defined. There really is no such thing as an "unset" variable in C++.
Even if you say "int var;" and do not initialize it, the variable has a value, usually garbage, but it's still "set" in the PHP sense.
The closes I suppose would be the preprocessor's #ifdef and #ifndef which only checks to see if you've defined a variable using #define. But in my experience this is mostly used for omitting or adding code based on flags. For example:
// code code code
#ifdef DEBUG
// debug only code that will not be included in final product.
#endif
// more code more code
You can define DEBUG using #define to determine whether to include "DEBUG" code now.
Perhaps telling a bit more about what you're trying to do with the C++ equivalent of isset will give you a better idea of how to go about doing it "The C++ Way".
There is no direct means of doing this in the language. However, it is possible to do this sort of thing by using a map such as the following:
typedef std::map<std::string, int> variables_type;
variables_type variables;
variables["var"] = 1;
if(variables.find("jon") == variables.end())
std::cout << "variable, \"jon\" not set\n";
In order to make this a variable like those used in PHP or javascript, the implementation would need to use some sort of variant type.
Not really. You can't dynamically create variables (though you can dynamically create storage with malloc() et al, or new et al. in C++) in C. I suppose dynamically loaded libraries blur the picture, but even there, the way you establish whether the variable exists is by looking up its name. If the name is not there, then, short of running a compiler to create a dynamically loaded module and then loading it, you are probably stuck. The concept really doesn't apply to C or C++.
As said in other answers, in C++ variables are never undefined. However, variables can be uninitialised, in which case their contents are not specified in the language standard (and implemented by most compilers to be whatever happened to be stored at that memory location).
Normally a compiler offers a flag to detect possibly uninitialised variables, and will generate a warning if this is enabled.
Another usage of isset could be to deal with different code. Remember that C++ is a statically compiled language, and attempting to redefine a symbol will result in a compile time error, removing the need for isset.
Finally, what you might be looking for is a null pointer. For that, just use a simple comparison:
int * x(getFoo());
if (x) {
cout << "Foo has a result." << endl;
} else {
cout << "Foo returns null." << endl;
}
Well there is always Boost.Optional
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_36_0/libs/optional/doc/html/index.html
which should almost do what you want.
Short answer: NO
Standard followup question: What problem are you really trying to solve?
You've got to separate two things here: variable declaration and variable contents.
As said in other answers, unlike PHP, C++ doesn't allow a variable to be used before it's declared.
But apart from that, it can be uninitialized.
I think the PHP isset function tries to find out if a variable has a usable value. In C++, this corresponds best to a pointer being NULL or valid.
The closest thing I can think of is to use pointers rather than real variables. Then you can check fro NULL.
However, it does seem like you're solving wrong problem for the language, or using wrong language to solve your problem.