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Why don't languages or IDEs support attaching descriptive metadata to variables?

by azeemba on 8/12/24, 3:28 PM with 2 comments

• by PaulHoule on 8/12/24, 3:41 PM

  You can put arbitrary metadata on functions, classes and other things that are basically objects in in Python. If you write

     def somefunction(x):
        ... body ...
  

  you can later write

     somefunction.specialmetadata = "a value"
  

  so what you can do is fairly unlimited. You can't write, however

     x = 4
     x.metavalue = 3
  

  as the int isn't a general object. Even if you did the metadata would apply to the value (the '4') and not the variable (the 'x')

• by thesuperbigfrog on 8/12/24, 4:11 PM

  Clojure supports metadata:

  https://clojure.org/reference/metadata