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Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2000 15:55:05 +1100
To: ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org
From: Peter Donald <donaldp@apache.org>
Subject: Re: Ant2 and properties
Cc: <ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org>
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At 08:51  17/12/00 -0800, James Duncan Davidson wrote:
>On 12/4/00 5:30 AM, "Conor MacNeill" <conor@m64.com> wrote:
>
>> I certainly support unifying properties and the other datatypes. I had
>> originally just seen this as making property a string datatype, using
>> the same namespace and passing to subprojects, etc. What you are
>> suggesting above is a little different. With the above we would probably
>> have an explicit string datatype.
>
>As I was just saying to Conor offline -- I think I might be able to go for:
>
><property name="foo" value="bar/foo.html" type="java.lang.File"/>
>
>Where the property hashtable was a name->object mapping and the default
>object type was String. If some other type were specified, then that type
>would be constructed with a String constructor taking the value as the
>String passed to the constructor.
>
>${foo} is satisfied by getProperty("foo").toString();

Are you sure thats wise. That could end up with large number of conversions
and large amounts of uneeded verbosity. COnsider the average case

<property name="dist.base" value="dist" type="java.lang.File"/>
<property name="dist.lib" value="${dist.base}/lib" type="java.lang.File"/>
...

<mkdir dir="${dist.lib}" />

That would involve 5 different conversions - and considering that file
properties are usually used as file parameters the conversions could be
greatly  decreased and simplified if conversion wasn't mandatory.


Cheers,

Pete

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