What are valid type parameters?

General Usage
1

I am trying to stuff quite a bit of information into parameters of a type, in the hope that dispatching on this will create efficient code. Doing this, I ran into the question of what is allowed, exactly.

Is the following correct: a value V is valid for a type parameter iff either

  1. isbits(V)
  2. isa(V, Symbol)
  3. isa(V, Type)
    Is there anything else?

To make things concrete, what I am trying to encode as type parameters are a return type, and a Vector{Pair{Int,Type}}. The latter does not work, but I can split the pairs, ending up two vectors, which works.

2

Also Tuple of Symbol and isbits type.

Encode return type in parameter is fine (like convert) but you shouldn’t try to “help” inference this way.

1 Like
3

Thanks. I am not “helping” type inference, I am encoding all the information in type parameters (it does not exist anywhere else). I got the idea from a code example which converts parser spec strings to symbols, and puts them in a type parameter (can’t find the link now).

Another question I ran into is the following: given a Tuple{...}, how do I extract the type parameters? Eg from Tuple{Int,Float64}, how would I get the [Int,Float64]?

EDIT:

xx(T::Type) = map(name->fieldtype(T,name), fieldnames(T))

works. But I have a feeling I probably should not be doing this :smiley:

4 
julia> [Tuple{Int,Float64}.parameters...]
2-element Array{DataType,1}:
 Int64
 Float64
1 Like
5

neat. another question: how could I have discovered this? I could not find it in the manual, and dump does not give anything meaningful for Tuples.

6 
julia> typeof(Tuple{Int,Float64})
DataType

julia> fieldnames(DataType)
17-element Array{Symbol,1}:
[...]
:parameters
[...]