The Wikipedia article has a pretty decent summary: In computing, type introspection is the ability of a program to examine the type or properties of an object at runtime. Some programming languages possess this capability. Introspection should not be confused with reflection, which goes a step further and is the ability for a program to … Read more
concreteCat,_ := reflect.ValueOf(cat).Interface().(Cat) see http://golang.org/doc/articles/laws_of_reflection.html fox example type MyInt int var x MyInt = 7 v := reflect.ValueOf(x) y := v.Interface().(float64) // y will have type float64. fmt.Println(y)
Reflection is most commonly used to circumvent the static type system, however it also has some interesting use cases: Let’s write an ORM! If you’re familiar with NHibernate or most other ORMs, you write classes which map to tables in your database, something like this: // used to hook into the ORMs innards public class … Read more
First of all, Rust doesn’t have reflection; reflection implies you can get details about a type at runtime, like the fields, methods, interfaces it implements, etc. You can not do this with Rust. The closest you can get is explicitly implementing (or deriving) a trait that provides this information. Each type gets a TypeId assigned … Read more
What you’re looking for is called the data dictionary. In sqlite a list of all tables can be found by querying sqlite_master table (or view?) sqlite> create table people (first_name varchar, last_name varchar, email_address varchar); sqlite> select * from sqlite_master; table|people|people|2|CREATE TABLE people (first_name varchar, last_name varchar, email_address varchar) To get column information you can … Read more