When someone asked how you can find out the type of T inside your generic type Ray responded that if you need to do that you may be doing something wrong and why that might be necessary because generic types should be type agnostic.
It might be correct if you only think of collection types when you think about generics. And this is what many people do, hence the discussion I have seen in several places why other pascal languages would need generics because they have powerful array support or other excuses.
But this is limited thinking very much. Generics are way more than a tool to build collection types.
You can do things like the multicast events in Spring4D where of course the generic type needs to find out the exact type info of the T in Event<T> to execute the correct code depending on how you are dealing with a event type or an anonymous method type.
Or think about using generics when using the Spring4D dependency injection container. How could we use TContainer.RegisterType<T> or TContainer.Resolve<T> without finding out the exact type. In fact in that API you mostly don't even pass a variable of that type but just use the generic methods as replacement for something like TContainer.RegisterType(TypeInfo(...)).
Want more examples? Sure!
Think of something like Mock<T> where T is then the type you want to create a mock for. You of course need to find out the type info to pass that into the code that does all the rtti magic beneath (like TVirtualInterface). Think of fluent APIs that return T and provide some typesafe way to use that API (which is what the container registration API and mocks do). Hey, even TComparer<T> from System.Generics.Defaults internally looks up what type the T is to call the correct comparison routine depending on the TTypeKind of the type.
I hope that showed some of the examples where generics give you great power beyond that overused "list of something" example. I am sure you can think of more possibilities!
You can do things like the multicast events in Spring4D where of course the generic type needs to find out the exact type info of the T in Event<T> to execute the correct code depending on how you are dealing with a event type or an anonymous method type.
Or think about using generics when using the Spring4D dependency injection container. How could we use TContainer.RegisterType<T> or TContainer.Resolve<T> without finding out the exact type. In fact in that API you mostly don't even pass a variable of that type but just use the generic methods as replacement for something like TContainer.RegisterType(TypeInfo(...)).
Want more examples? Sure!
Think of something like Mock<T> where T is then the type you want to create a mock for. You of course need to find out the type info to pass that into the code that does all the rtti magic beneath (like TVirtualInterface). Think of fluent APIs that return T and provide some typesafe way to use that API (which is what the container registration API and mocks do). Hey, even TComparer<T> from System.Generics.Defaults internally looks up what type the T is to call the correct comparison routine depending on the TTypeKind of the type.
I hope that showed some of the examples where generics give you great power beyond that overused "list of something" example. I am sure you can think of more possibilities!
Oh, by the way the answer to the question asked is: you can use TypeInfo(T) or some of the new intrinsic functions to get information of your generic type parameter.
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