[Mono-devel-list] Mono .net 2.0 preview and generics

[Jonathan Gilbert]

At 02:29 PM 13/05/2004 -0500, Ben Martin wrote:
[snip]
>Actually his code does that properly as far as I can see...
>
>This appears to be a bug in gmcs... Consider the following code which 
>compiles but then chokes when run (of course...). It SHOULD NOT compile 
>as is... And if you change it to USE the ref modifiers like it supposed 
>to, it doesn't work... (Incidentally I tried it with non-generic classes 
>and it works as expected, so it is evidently a problem only with the 
>generics part). (I am using beta1, I am assuming this has not been fixed 
>already; I didn't see anything about it on bugzilla).

I agree. It looks like the "ref" flag is being ignored at the method header
(not at the call site). This would explain why the compiler is trying to
convert a "ref T" to a "T"; it thinks the function takes a "T". I haven't
worked on that part of the code, and I do not have an environment set up to
make changes and test them, but I suspect the plumbing for the "ref" flag
is all in place, and that the fix is likely a one-liner within the parser
itself, before the parse tree hits the compiler proper.

Jonathan