[Vala] Ellipsis syntax (Was: Ellipsis as an argument..)

["Didier \"Ptitjes\"" <ptitjes free fr>]

Hello Shawn!

[Mode Introduction on]
I take benefit of this first post to introduce myself. I did some little 
contributions these days to the Vala project, but never subscribed (ouuh 
shame!) to the vala-list.
These days, I do mainly work on SHR's projects and in some tinier way to 
FSO. At SHR (and FSO), we are massively switching to Vala.
For our own projects, I'm mostly interested in helping Vala for its 
compile-time and runtime-time integration of gobject-introspection, and 
dbus support (async, errors, ...).
[Mode Introduction off]

> So.. You can probably guess my question. I have the need for a method to
> take an arbitrary number of args. I know ellipsis' are the key, but
> haven't a clue as to how to access them from there. I've looked through
> the docs, examples and other's code to no avail. I have seen reference
> to va_list, va_state and va_end from within c, but wondered if vala
> didn't do some magic and auto cast them as an array object.
>
> ..or.. 
>
> is it more practical/better to just pass those as a single array object?
>
> In either case, I'd love to see the syntax for the ellipsis for my own
> curiosity..

I asked the same to Jürg on the channel, and it appears there is only 
for now a syntax for typed ellipsis. The following is an example of the 
syntax :

public static void foo(params string[] args) {
        // ...
}

So if your arguments can be subclasses of GObject, you could use "params 
Object[] args".

It appears that there isn't yet any syntax to query about an untyped 
ellipsis content. I think this is the best occasion to make proposals.

I have none to propose as the only I know of is the one of Java, and it 
is typed as Java supports auto-boxing.

I would be glad to implement it and propose a patch if something gets 
consensus. Any ideas ?

> Thanks
> Shawn

Best regards, Didier.