morning train ride tangent

This morning, on the train, I wanted to open up processing.js and get back to working on ticket #237. I got into it, earlier and reproduced all the problems that the ticket entails. We have empty classes with no methods or constructors not working, we have constructors following methods working, but the methods above the constructor not working, and we have the hardest problem in overloading only working in terms of number of arguments, and not types of arguments. What I mean is:

void addItem(int item){...}
void addItem(String item){...}

This is valid processing, because the two methods are different, but, in JavaScript, variable types are not important, and the above code will be translated into:

var addItem = function(var item){...};
var addItem = function(var item){...};

The methods are translated into the same method, this also does not work with constructors either, which is a different problem because the way processing.js handles consturctors. What processing.js does is, because you can send any number of arguments into a method or constructor, and access the variable by using arguments[n], in a for loop less than arguments.length. This is how constructor overloading is handled in processing.js. There is only one real constructor, it just has if statements checking how many arguments there are. Here is an example for how processing.js translates a class:

class Obj{
  Obj(String item){
    item = "in constructor one";
  }
  Obj(int item, String item2){
    item = "in constructor two";
  }
}

into this:

function Obj() {with(this){
 if ( arguments.length === 1 ) {
 var item = arguments[0];


    item = "in constructor one";

  }

  if ( arguments.length === 2 ) {
 var item = arguments[0];
 var  item2 = arguments[1];


    item = "in constructor two";

  }


}}

If you notice, it's just one method that filters out the contents of the constructor into various if statements, but it's only the length of the arguments, and not the types. What I would need to do is grab the types before the types are lost, and then add a type check for all variables at the same time I check the argument length, but methods are not like this.

Funny thing is, while researching this, I came across this blog post, and as soon as I saw the code, I recognized it. This is John Resig's blog, and he is the creator of processing.js, and his post helped me a lot with how to understand the addMethod, method, and the caveats involved.

Ah shoot, I got off on another tangent. Ok, While I was planning on doing this ticket I have been talking about up to this point on the train, I ended up seeing something in code that made me go back to my last ticke on array initialization. I noticed, later in the code, the use of ArrayList() for more than just creating an array, but initializing. I still cannot get it to initialize the array, but I've spend an unexpected morning on this. The idea of ArrayList is to send a size for the array, to create it, but all the values will be empty. Like so:

new ArrayList(2); // creates an arraylist with 2 empty items
new ArrayList(2, 2);  // creates a 2D arraylist with an array of two, with two empty items

I saw later in the code something like this

new ArrayList(["Thing 1", "Thing 2"]); // apparently, this is creating and initializing an arraylist

Like I said, I didn't (yet) get this to work, but I think it would improve the way it's already being done, with just the array like this:

var things = ["Thing 1", "Thing 2"];

I should get this wrapped up into:

var things = new ArrayList(["Thing 1", "Thing 2"]); // this would be ideal

My train ride tests did not work, but I'm going to reduce it more and see why. First I should get arraylist initialization to work. period. Then I will attempt to add it into processing.js. Anyway, that's all for today.