Skip to main content

K ?

Whisper the terrible words type erasure to any moderately experienced Java programmer and you're likely to see:
  1. fear
  2. loathing
  3. soul-crushing sense of defeat
  4. all of the above
Now if you are a moderately experienced Java programmer, but you're thinking to yourself "what's type erasure ?" my advice is this:

Stop reading now !

Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

My own rule of thumb, when confronted by the need to query the identity of K, or V, or T or any of their evil friends, in the innards of a class with generic type parameters, is to run away. Sadly, there are circumstances when that's just not an option. Although I deeply empathise with those who equate Java reflection with incest and folk dancing there are times when it's black magic or nothing. But where to find the magic ?

Enter Richard Gomes and his article: Using TypeTokens to retrieve generic parameters. This demonstrates the seemingly impossible feat of pulling erased rabbits out of Java's hat.

I'm off to try it now... "Nothing up my sleeve..."


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fitting an ellipse to point data

Some time ago I wrote an R function to fit an ellipse to point data, using an algorithm developed by Radim Halíř and Jan Flusser 1 in Matlab, and posted it to the r-help list . The implementation was a bit hacky, returning odd results for some data. A couple of days ago, an email arrived from John Minter asking for a pointer to the original code. I replied with a link and mentioned that I'd be interested to know if John made any improvements to the code. About ten minutes later, John emailed again with a much improved version ! Not only is it more reliable, but also more efficient. So with many thanks to John, here is the improved code: fit.ellipse <- function (x, y = NULL) { # from: # http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Fitting-a-half-ellipse-curve-tp2719037p2720560.html # # Least squares fitting of an ellipse to point data # using the algorithm described in: # Radim Halir & Jan Flusser. 1998. # Numerically stable direct least squares fitting of ellipses
2 comments
Read more

Circle packing in R (again)

Back in 2010 I posted some R code for circle packing . Now, just five years later, I've ported the code to Rcpp and created a little package which you can find at GitHub . The main function is circleLayout which takes a set of overlapping circles and tries to find a non-overlapping arrangement for them. Here's an example: And here's the code: # Create some random circles, positioned within the central portion # of a bounding square, with smaller circles being more common than # larger ones. ncircles <- 200 limits <- c(-50, 50) inset <- diff(limits) / 3 rmax <- 20 xyr <- data.frame( x = runif(ncircles, min(limits) + inset, max(limits) - inset), y = runif(ncircles, min(limits) + inset, max(limits) - inset), r = rbeta(ncircles, 1, 10) * rmax) # Next, we use the `circleLayout` function to try to find a non-overlapping # arrangement, allowing the circles to occupy any part of the bounding square. # The returned value is a list with elements for
5 comments
Read more

Graph-based circle packing

The previous two posts showed examples of a simple circle packing algorithm using the packcircles package (available from CRAN and GitHub ). The algorithm involved iterative pair-repulsion to jiggle the circles until (hopefully) a non-overlapping arrangement emerged. In this post we'll look an alternative approach. An algorithm to find an arrangement of circles satisfying a prior specification of circle sizes and tangencies was described by Collins and Stephenson in their 2003 paper in Computation Geometry Theory and Applications. A version of their algorithm was implemented in Python by David Eppstein as part of his PADS library (see CirclePack.py ). I've now ported David's version to R/Rcpp and included it in the packcircles package. In the figure below, the graph on the left represents the desired pattern of circle tangencies: e.g. circle 7 should touch all of, and only, circles 1, 2, 6 and 8. Circles 5, 7, 8 and 9 are internal , while the remaining circles are exter
Post a Comment
Read more