F# operator "?"

Question

I just read the information on this page, and while a new ? operator is mentioned, it's quite unclear to me what would its usage be.
Could anyone please provide a quick explanation, post a code snipped of how would this operator be used and possibly mention a use case?
Edit: this is really awkward, I've noticed that the ? operator is no longer mentioned in Don's release notes. Any idea of why is that?

Answer 1

It sounds like the "?" operator relates to the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR). That is, you use it when you want to bind to an object member (method, property) at runtime, rather than at compile time.

It's funny because I was hoping that this would be how dynamic member invocation would work in C# also. Alas, C# exposes this functionality via a "pseudo" type ("dynamic" IIRC). In my opinion, this makes the code somewhat less clear (because you have to track down the variable declaration to know if the call is early-bound or late-bound).

I don't know the exact syntax, but if I had to guess, it either replaces or augments the "." (dot) operator. As in:

let x = foo?Bar()

or maybe:

let x = foo.?Bar()

Answer 2

There are two new "special" operators in this F# release, (?) and (?<-). They are not defined, but they are available for overloading, so you can define them yourself. The special bit is how they treat their 2nd operand: they require it to be a valid F# identifier, but pass it to function implementing the operator as a string. In other words:

a?b

is desugared to:

(?) a "b"

and:

a?b <- c

is desugared to:

 (?<-) a "b" c

A very simple definition of those operators could be:

let inline (?) (obj: 'a) (propName: string) : 'b =
    let propInfo = typeof<'a>.GetProperty(propName)
    propInfo.GetValue(obj, null) :?> 'b

let inline (?<-) (obj: 'a) (propName: string) (value: 'b) =
    let propInfo = typeof<'a>.GetProperty(propName)
    propInfo.SetValue(obj, value, null)

Note that since the return type for the gettor is generic, you'll have to specify it at use site in most cases, i.e.:

let name = foo?Name : string

though you can still chain-call (?) (since first argument of (?) is also generic):

let len = foo?Name?Length : int

Another, more interesting, implementation is to re-use CallByName method provided by VB:

open Microsoft.VisualBasic    

let inline (?) (obj: 'a) (propName: string) : 'b =
    Interaction.CallByName(obj, propName, CallType.Get, null) :?> 'b //'

let inline (?<-) (obj: 'a) (propName: string) (value: 'b) =
    Interaction.CallByName(obj, propName, CallType.Set, [| (value :> obj) |])
    |> ignore

The advantage of that is that it will handle both properties and fields correctly, work with IDispatch COM objects, etc.