Is it possible to use CallerMemberNameAttribute in f#

Question

The attribute and C# examples are noted here but it doesn\'t look to be possible for FSharp.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.compilerservices.

Answer 1

Here's a quick 'n' dirty hack, which abuses inline to get this info:

module Tracing = 
    open System
    open System.Text.RegularExpressions

    let (|TraceInfo|_|) (s:string) =
        let m = Regex.Match(s, "at (?<mem>.+?) in (?<file>.+?\.[a-zA-Z]+):line (?<line>\d+)")
        if m.Success then
            Some(m.Groups.["mem"].Value, m.Groups.["file"].Value, int m.Groups.["line"].Value)
        else None

    let inline trace s =
        printfn "%s" s
        match Environment.StackTrace with
        | TraceInfo(m, f, l) ->
            printfn "  Member: %s" m
            printfn "  File  : %s" f
            printfn "  Line  : %d" l
        | _ -> ()

It actually does work, more or less:

Answer 2

A quick search through the compiler source code shows that the name CallerMemberName does not appear anywhere in the code, so I think this feature is not supported. (You can certainly mark a parameter with the attribute, but these attributes are special - they instruct the compiler instead of being discovered and used in some way at runtime.)

Update July 2016: As of late June, F# now supports CallerLineNumber and CallerFilePath, but CallerMemberName is still absent. It seems like that one in particular is more difficult to implement, unfortunately.

On a related note, F# has a few special identifiers that let you get the current source file name and line number, so you might be able to get similar information with __SOURCE_DIRECTORY__ and __LINE__
(but not from the caller as in C#).