[IronPython] Future handling of op_Implicit

[Giles Thomas]

Hi,

I guess we're going to have to use C# to work around the lack of 
op_Implicit support in the short term, but I'm interested in knowing 
about the IP team's plans for handling conversion operators going forward.

Here's our situation; we have a highly-scriptable application, and our 
clients want to be able to call their own .NET libraries from their 
scripts.  However, their libraries make heavy use of the implicit casts, 
so that they can (for example) have a method that takes an instance of 
C1, but pass it a C2 and rely on C1's op_Implicit(C2) to handle the 
conversion.  This works fine for them when using other .NET languages, 
but of course doesn't work in IronPython. 

I must admit that I don't really know what IP could do with this kind of 
code; if I understand correctly, op_Implicit(x) in (say) C# is 
dispatched based on the type of the variable x rather then the type of 
the object to which it is a reference, and of course variable type in 
that sense is not a meaningful concept in a dynamic language.

What should IronPython do?  Is this a case where people are going to 
have to write more code if they want to use a dynamic language?


Regards,

Giles
-- 

Giles Thomas
giles.thomas at resolversystems.com
+44 (0) 20 7253 6372

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