SAC Models Refactoring: getClassName()

[taketwo]

I have came across a bug in SAC Sphere model. While investigating how to fix it I have dug in the model sources and was surprised by a large amount of code repetition. Therefore, I decided to do a bit of refactoring together with fixing the bug. I will submit the changes in a series of pull request to simplify review process.

This pull request adds getClassName() function to all SAC models. (The same kind of function is contained in many other PCL classes such as Filter, Registration, Feature, etc.). It comes in handy e.g. when logging errors.

[jspricke]

I'm a little biased here. Isn't it the same as typeid().name()? On the other side, a consistent API is nice as well.

[taketwo]

Isn't it the same as typeid().name()?

No, it is different. typeid produces a mangled name, e.g.:

 std::cout << typeid(pcl::SampleConsensusModelLine<pcl::PointXYZ>).name()

Will output something like N3pcl24SampleConsensusModelLineINS_8PointXYZEEE. I guess this is precisely the reason why other PCL classes have such getClassName() function.

By the way, recent versions of Boost feature new "TypeIndex" library, which provides desired output:

std::cout << boost::typeindex::type_id<pcl::SampleConsensusModelLine<pcl::PointXYZ>>().pretty_name()

gives pcl::SampleConsensusModelLine<pcl::PointXYZ> (at least on clang). But it is just too new for us anyways.

[jspricke]

Just pipe it thought c++filt ;).

[taketwo]

@jspricke I'm not sure if I understood your comment. If this is a joke, then can we merge and move on? If it's not, then could you please elaborate on what exactly you propose?

[jspricke]

Sorry, that wasn't meant as an offense. c++filt is part of binutils and can unmangle the type name:
$ c++filt -t N3pcl24SampleConsensusModelLineINS_8PointXYZEEE pcl::SampleConsensusModelLine<pcl::PointXYZ>
But I guess it's not so well known, so I would be ok with merging this.

[taketwo]

I know what c++filt is, it's just that I do not understand how it is relevant here. A typical usage for getClassName() would be (this example is taken from Feature class):

PCL_ERROR ("[pcl::%s::initCompute] No input dataset containing normals was given!\n", getClassName ().c_str ());

Of course, we can print mangled name here, but then the user will get nonsense messages unless he manually pipes program output through c++filt. (Also, what about Windows users?)

No offense taken, I simply didn't understand your idea :)

[jspricke]

I don't care about Windows users ;)