<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Jul 21, 2016, at 4:06 PM, Anton Zhilin via swift-evolution <<a href="mailto:swift-evolution@swift.org" class="">swift-evolution@swift.org</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class="gmail_extra">2016-07-22 1:34 GMT+03:00 Dmitri Gribenko <span dir="ltr" class=""><<a href="mailto:gribozavr@gmail.com" target="_blank" class="">gribozavr@gmail.com</a>></span>:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><span class="">> Mirror.DisplayStyle contains optional and set as special cases, but does not<br class="">> contain function<br class="">> Mirror collects all information possible at initialization, while for true<br class="">> reflection we want laziness<br class="">> Mirror allows customization. For example, Array<T> is represented with a<br class="">> field for each of its elements. Do we want this for “true” reflection we<br class="">> want to add in the future?<br class=""><br class=""></span>Why can't we add these features to Mirror in future?</blockquote><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Reflection in some other languages works as follows: we have a type (let's name it 'Reflection'). Each instance of it contains ID of one type and can, for example, retrieve an array of its static or normal methods.<br class=""></div><div class="">'Mirror', on the other hand, serves as a container for information about a single instance. Moreover, types can completely customize contents of their 'Mirror's. This is incompatible with laziness and with how reflection should work, based on experience from other languages.</div></div></div></div></blockquote><br class=""></div><div>I think pointing a Mirror at a metatype value could be a good a mechanism for getting information about the type's stored properties and other members.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>FWIW Mirrors are inspired by a feature of the same name in the Self language, which made reflection somewhat more principled than the disorganized APIs you see in Java and C#. Perhaps the latter are not a good model to follow here :-)</div><div><br class=""></div><div>Slava</div><div><br class=""></div><br class=""></body></html>