The reflect.Type class

The reflect.Type class is a generic API to inspect types.

This class is provided in the reflect C-Extension library; To use this class, import the reflect package with:

IMPORT reflect

A reflect.Type object is the runtime representation of a type. A type can be anonymous (when defining a variable directly with a type specification), or it can be a user-defined and named type, created from a TYPE instruction.

Several methods of this API are restricted to special kinds of types. For example, only the reflect.Type objects of kind "ARRAY" and "DICTIONARY" can return an element-type with getElementType(). The program should check the kind of a type before calling kind-specific methods. The kind of a type an be checked with the getKind() method.

Important:

The exceptions thrown by the reflect.* API can only be caught with a TRY/CATCH block: If WHENEVER ERROR CONTINUE is active and the reflection API throws an exception, the program stops.