What's mean colon inside a dart class? - dart

I'm trying understand what's the mean of this two final lines of code, on colons... It's a syntax question.
I'm following this github example and I have this doubt on my head.
Can someone help me with this?.
class DietPlan extends ParseObject implements ParseCloneable {
DietPlan() : super(keyDietPlan);
DietPlan.clone() : this();

The part after : is called "initializer list.
It is a list of expressions that can access constructor parameters and can assign to instance fields, even final instance fields.
The first colon, i.e. DietPlan() : super(keyDietPlan); means that you are calling the super constructor, constructor of ParseCloneable in this case.
This is a core OOP concept, you can extend or implement one class to another and you must call the superclass constructor if you do so. This is just a style of doing the same in Dart.
The second colon works in similar way, to understand that you need to understand what is cloning of objects,
Object cloning refers to creation of exact copy of an object. It creates a new instance of the class of current object and initializes all its fields with exactly the contents of the corresponding fields of this object.
This is whats happening on the second line.

Related

Instantiating a class by String name in Dart

I am trying to call a method of a class that I only know by name as a String. Now therefore I would need a ClassMirror of that class that allowes me to instantiate an instance. However, creating ClassMirrors seems to be only possible by entering a type using reflectClass(Type) or by passing an already existing instance of that class into reflect(dynamic). So these aren`t helping if I only have a String.
In Java you can do this pretty easily, by calling Class.forName(String). Then you would get a Constructor instance, make it accessibly and call it.
Does anyone know if this is even possible in dart? What seems weird is that once you have a ClassMirror you can access fields and methods by passing symbols, which can be created by Strings.
You can put a specific list of strings to map to a specific list of closures to create a new object with specific parameters.
But you can't get a reflection without using dart:mirrors, which is being deprecated, and also had a negative impact on tree shaking to get the payload size down.
In general, you're invited to look at the package:reflectable to achieve most of what you'd want out of dart:mirrors, using source-to-source builders.

If a set literal is of type set then what is its class in dart?

So the following code snippet
Set mySet = {1,2,3};
is an instance of type Set which is permissible, however what would the class of the set literal be. I have tried to search for this, however I have found no answer in the dart documentation.
A literal exists only in your source code. Asking for its "class" doesn't make a lot of sense.
Using a Set, Map, or List literal is just syntactic sugar for invoking a corresponding constructor. The Set factory constructor constructs a LinkedHashSet.
However, you'll see that LinkedHashSet is also abstract. Its factory constructor returns an instance of a private, internal class. You can see its typename via print(Set().runtimeType); the actual type might be different for different platforms and is unlikely to be useful to you.

Swift optimisation performance clarification

After seeing the video here, i got confused about the use of final keyword.
Here below is an example image from the video
Here there are two classes Pet as parent class and Dog as child class, and we have function implementation of makeNoise(p) which takes Pet instance as parameter. But behind the scene compiler inserts few more lines to this method for checking class.
Since makeNoise(p) takes parameter as Pet instance, compiler should directly call the property "name" from the Pet class, as the method parameter is for this class.
Why would compiler be worried about the overriding the property in child class, because the parameter is a Pet instance and compiler knows it. isn't it?
My question may looks silly but if someone can explain it more clearly, i would appreciate it.
The parameter of makeNoise(p: Pet) must be a Pet, but it does not to be an immediate instance of Pet itself. Since Dog is a subclass of Pet, it is also a Pet. Therefore, in Swift it is perfectly valid for someone to pass a Dog instance into makeNoise, in which case the overridden version of noise will be called. Also, this dog may have chosen a different value for name.
Dynamic Type
This is called the 'dynamic type' of p. The compile-time type of p is Pet, but the compiler must account for the fact that the run-time type of p might be a Pet subclass that overrides something. This is called the 'dynamic type' of p. In Swift 1 and 2, which were in use at the time of WWDC 2015, use the .dynamicType syntax on an object to determine its runtime type. Swift 3 uses the type(of: object) global function. This is not something you'll need very often, but it demonstrates how the compiler allows subclasses to act as their parent and still override things.
final
final tells the compiler that either the class will not be subclassed, or the property or method will not be overridden. This way it won't need to check for overrides.
Changes in Swift 3
This year's WWDC 2016 session on Swift performance did not mention the final keyword once, if I remember correctly, however. While it is still available in Swift 3 and serves the same purpose, there are new ways to prevent subclassing and overriding. This is via Access Control. Swift 3 introduces the open keyword as distinct from public.
public – The object, property, method, etc. is accessible by anyone inside or outside the module
open – The class or method is not only accessible by anyone, but may also be subclassed (in the case of classes) or overridden (in the case of methods).
I am not sure if this, like final, communicates to the Swift compiler that it does not need to do its extra type checking.

Why is Dart's Datetime.parse not a factory constructor?

Dart's Datetime class has a number of named constructors, but DateTime.parse() is not one of them. Instead, DateTime.parse() is a static method which returns a DateTime. To me, it makes sense as a constructor (since you are generating a new DateTime object in a manner not too different from the Datetime.utc() constructor).
Theories I've come up with are to mirror the fact that int.parse is not a constructor or to allow easier chaining (you don't need to use the cascade operator with a static method). But maybe there is another reason that I'm not thinking of. Does anyone know why they didn't make it a named constructor?
More explanation for the same change for Uri.parse: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.dart.general/17081
"parse" is special. The question is: do you see parsing as an
operation that does something and ends up giving you the result, or do
you see the string as data to construct a new element. If you see it
as the earlier, then "parse" should be a static function. If you see
the string as the data, then it should be a named constructor.
And then, of course, there is consistency.

Multiple inheritance with Dart and accessing public variables from multiple levels up

I've been working with Dart for a few weeks now, and so far so good. I've run into a problem, however, when trying to access variables from a class that's a few levels higher. I'm not sure how best to explain this without an actual sample, so here's a quick example:
http://pastebin.com/r2ru6G2w
To put this as simply as possible:
AClass has a variable named "parameter."
BClass inherits from AClass, also has a constructor parameter (incomingParameter) that is assigned to the "parameter" variable from AClass.
CClass inherits from BClass, also has a constructor parameter (incomingParameter) that is simply passed on to BClass via the super initializer.
DClass inherits from CClass, but does not have any constructor parameter. Instead, I'm trying to pass the "parameter" variables all the way from AClass into the super initializer.
This results in an error, that says "Only static members can be accessed in initializers." Fair enough. Any idea how to get around this?
Thanks for all the help,
MR

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