• Justin Whear <justin economicmodeling.com> Nov 05 2009

Justin Whear <justin economicmodeling.com> writes:

Justin Johansson Wrote:

 I assert that the semantics of "toString" or similarly named/purposed
methods/functions in many
 PL's (including and not limited to D) is ill-defined.
 
 To put this statement into perspective, I would be most appreciative of D NG
readers
 responding with their own idea(s) of what the semantics of "toString" are (or
should be)
 in a language agnostic ideology.
 
 If there are more than, say, two or three different views on the said
semantics then my
 "ill-definition" assertion is surely correct.
 
 If there are no replies on this matter, then guess I'm left concludeless.
 
 Just thinking in the language round-up that this is (just another) one of the
things
 we should address as a community.
 
 So what does "toString" mean to you?
 
 **beers,
 Justin
 
 **caveat: free beer offer available in-store only
 


Two things:
1) Primarily for debugging purposes. It's very convenient.
2) As a default behavior in a few cases. For instance, if a listbox widget
hasn't been given a view that knows how to render objects of type Foo, it can
default to rendering the results of toString.