Miranda conformTo
From Erights
__conformTo/1 is a Miranda message.
Contents |
__conformTo/1
Clients
A guard which does not immediately accept the recipient may call __conformTo(the guard) on it, and check and return the result thereof instead.
Implementations
Implementations of __conformTo/1 should return the recipient if they have no better answer.
Miranda behavior
Returns the recipient.
? def obj {}
> obj.__conformTo(any)
# value: <obj>
? obj.__conformTo(List)
# value: <obj>
? obj.__conformTo(def bobj {})
# value: <obj>
? obj.__conformTo(null)
# value: <obj>
Original Javadoc
XXX merge
When a guard doesn't succeed by itself at coercing an object, the guard may enlists the object's aid in bring about a coercion it would find acceptable.
A guard enlists the object's aid at the price of being Gozarian. A Gozarian guard wants to enlists the object's aid because it is ignorant of the kind of object it's dealing with, so a generic protocol is needed. That's why __conformTo/1 is provided as a MirandaMethod.
The guard asks the object to conform to some guard that the object may know about. Often this will be the guard that's attempting the coercion. An object should attempt to return a representation of itself that the argument guard would succeed in coercing. A requesting guard should then try again on the result, but if this doesn't coerce, it should fail there rather than making further __conformTo/1 requests. This implies that it's the responsibility of the object's __conformTo/1 implementation to do any iteration needed for multi-step conversions.
The default (Miranda) implementation of __conformTo/1 just returns self.
