Generics

ChunkScript has robust support for generics. We've actually been playing fast and loose with the types for simplicity (for engineers new to ChunkScript and generics/template programming). Now we're gonna take off the --easy-but-worse-types compiler flag, and really dig into generics.

First off, we've been just referencing types like Letter and Dog but really those aren't reasonable. Let's zoom in on Dog:

var myDog: Dog = new Dog();

A dog isn't a type of data we can put in our system; we can't squeeze a Labrador Retriever into a stack frame (if we tried we'd get a runtime error).

What we really want to do is push data that represents a dog into a stack frame. We call these representations "objects". Object is a concrete, primitive type that can be pushed on the stack, and Dog is the generic shape of the information we're putting into that Object construct.

We can express this as Object<Dog>:

var myDogObject: Object<Dog> = new Object<Dog>(new Dog());

and then we can pass it to our walk fun-ction using a generic ArgumentsPasser:

walk(new Object<ArgumentsPasser<Object<Dog>>>(

new ArgumentsPasser<Object<Dog>>(myDog whichisa Object<Dog>)

) whichias Object<ArgumentsPasser<Object<Dog>>>

);

This may seem to be a lot of needless boilerplate, but it isn't.