Suggestion: shorter name for setexcludinghandlers!

[BioTurboNick]

setexcludinghandlers! is a bit long. Something like the following might be better:

setsilent!
setquiet!
setmuted!

And just a note here that if/when this is chosen, the examples in the GtkObservables.jl docs need to be updated. Currently uses .value, which doesn't work because that's not the current field name.

[hhaensel]

Hi @BioTurboNick , @SimonDanisch , @timholy

I want to come back on my [!] solution that I proposed already in #67.
We use it in Stipple.jl for our own subtype Reactive and find it very useful.

o = Observable(1)

# standard assignment
o[] = 10

# silent assignment by an exclamation mark between the brackets
o[!] = 100

Furthermore we pass arguments that are not ! on to the value of the observable and call notify in case of assignment.

o = [10, 20, 30]
o[2]
# 20

on(o) do x
    println("Hello $x")
end

o[2] = 200
# Hello [10, 200, 30]

The same with getproperty

mutable struct HH
    a::Integer
    b::Integer
end

o = Reactive(HH(1,2))

on(o) do x
    println("Hello $x")
end

o.a = 10
# Hello HH(10, 2)

Happy to hear what you think.

Note: Reactive has nothing to do with the package Reactive. It is an observable type Reactive <: AbstractObservable

[SimonDanisch]

This should really be a separate issue...
But, I also have a similar type in ShaderAbstractions:
https://github.com/SimonDanisch/ShaderAbstractions.jl/blob/master/src/types.jl#L12-L65=
Looking back on it, it doesn't seem that elegant, but maybe we can clean it up and add it to Observables.jl

[hhaensel]

We can make it a different issue with a better name.
Your idea is quite the same as mine.
If we 'd define these operations for AbstractObservables no macro would be needed

[hhaensel]

Shall I open a draft PR and paste an adaptation of my code?

[hhaensel]

I'dinclude push!, pushfirst!, empty! accordingly

[SimonDanisch]

Yeah, that'd be an idea.
For my type it's important that one can register for certain updates so that one can do:

on(array, :setindex) do (idx, new_value)
...
end

[hhaensel]

Yeah, that's what we did. We declared Reactive <: AbstractObservable.
I'll submit a PR then :-)

[BioTurboNick]

Just to throw this out there - _ might better indicate suppression than !

[hhaensel]

That's not possible, you have to use an operator character.
My idea was that ! indicates "not" notifying.

[treygreer]

(Never mind... I was running a garbled set of package versions because of a rogue Project.toml that wound up in my Windows home directory somehow. ) Feel free to delete this comment, or ask me to. Not sure what the process is here.

Er, I wound up here trying to track down a bug in Interact. It seems that WebIO throws an error looking for Observables.setexcludinghandlers!():

line 346 in scope.jl, webIO v0.8.17: Observables.setexcludinghandlers(ob, val, x -> !(x isa SyncCallback))

Complete newb here. Any suggestions?