Forum: IronRuby Value types - e.g. TimeSpan

Hi all

I've had some discussions offline about accessing the properties of
TimeSpan.

The issue is that while the static methods on TimeSpan work, the 
instance
properties don't:

t = System::TimeSpan.from_seconds(1.1) # works
m = t.total_milliseconds # doesn't work


All my testing done on iron7 on WP7 of course!

The route of this problem seems to be (from Tomas Matousek):

The problem is that the interpreter doesn't support instance method 
calls on
> value types:


> if (!node.Method.IsStatic && node.Method.DeclaringType.IsValueType &&
> !node.Method.DeclaringType.IsPrimitive)) _forceCompile = true;


> Such method can update the value type in-place, which is difficult to
> interpret. We don't know that the method is only reading the fields of the
> value type, so we disallow interpretation even if we could do that. I'll
> think about how to fix this but am not sure if we can do anything
> reasonable.


We're thinking about this... one thing is that I think we could allow 
this
for Get methods - for readonly properties - I need to read the code a 
bit (a
lot!) more before I can comment on whether this is correct though...


Stuart

You could probably allow methods as well, as the vast majority of value
types are immutable. Even in C#, calling Set on a value type only works 
if
that value type happens to be a local variable. If it comes back from a
property then it just becomes a no-op.

Jonathan