Handles

What exactly would a "local handle" be? Realising that a handle is actually a variable type, does this mean you can set any handle subvariables to a handle variable?

Handlers are normal variables.you cannot hve subvars or other stuff,just the difference that the Local Handle Variables can be any OBJECT in game, like units,effects,groups etc,but no integer,reals.

here is a link to a tutorial for the Local Handle Variables by KaTTaNa

http://www.wc3jass.com/viewtopic.php?t=2006

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I know jass quite well. I just hadn't cleared the thought that a handle variable could be any of its subtypes (unit, loc etc)

they should be able to be subtypes. yay inheritance. at least worth trying it.

God, I need a JASS tutor. You wanna teach me ed? I'll give you some rep.

Think of Java's Object type. This is jass's handle. Completely worthless in jass, but if you want to make a generic data collection class it might be interesting to use a handle, instead of a H2I converting the handle to an int.

Don't think about C/C++ Handles as jass's are simmilar but C is far more complicated then jass.

so what are you saying?

its the class from which all other objects inherit.
In Java to make a generic data collection its good to use Object, because it can take every type of object, and you can use a type cast statement when returning it.

In Jass, its completely worthless, because its faster to just use integers and only do a single H2I conversion.

But then if a handle variable could be a unit, loc, group etc, then why not allways use handle.

U can use unit function with handle parameters, handle != unit, but its the same type.

because you can't pass handle to a unit taking function. Just like Java you can't pass object to a string taking function. Even though technically the handle could be a unit, and the object could be a string. For the function to recognize this fact you have to typecast the object/handle to the subtype it requests.

As I said before because of this Jass's handle is pretty worthless, because we can just integer as its faster because we need to use less typecasting.

Handle requires more memory, this is like sayin "why not always use real numbers instead of integers" 101

I'm referring to the pointer. You can store the pointer as an integer or as a handle, its irrelevant because in both cases it still takes 4 bytes. The object exists regardless and is of a size I don't perticularly know and is variable anyway.

A handle is an object that you would probably call "abstract" in oop.

handle is the ancestor type of widget, and some other types like timer, trigger, and all of those.

widget is the ancestor of unit, item and destructable.

Every other type I didn't mention in this post and it is not code, integer , real, string or boolean . Is an descendant from handle too.

and since unit is a descendant of widget it is a descendant of handle.

Descendant as in when you have a function that takes handle you can use any type that is a descendant from it.