Make better use of reflection/homoiconicity

[GabrielKS]

Another catch-all issue for minor, low-priority refactors. There are some things we currently do using string manipulation, manually keeping track of lists of things, etc. that I think could be more elegantly accomplished using Julia's abilities to operate on itself. I'll start a list here:

[GabrielKS]

strip_module_name currently uses string manipulation to turn PowerSystems.HydroDispatch into "HydroDispatch". There's a built-in Julia method that operates on types to do this:

julia> string(Base.nameof(PowerSystems.HydroDispatch))
"HydroDispatch"

There are probably more intricacies to figure out here but I'm pretty confident a reflection-based approach is feasible.

[GabrielKS]

Sometimes we want to do the opposite, go from string to type, and currently we manually build a dictionary to avoid using eval. But there is a sort of inverse of Base.nameof:

julia> getproperty(PowerSystems, Symbol("HydroDispatch"))
PowerSystems.HydroDispatch

that I don't think has the same security risk as eval.

[daniel-thom]

Yes, we should use nameof. I noticed this function in Base at some point and started using it…but didn’t go back and change the old code.

Regarding this one:

julia> getproperty(PowerSystems, Symbol("HydroDispatch"))
PowerSystems.HydroDispatch

I’m not sure I follow what you’re referring to in the code, but we use this approach when de-serializing JSON to types. We store the module and type names as strings and then look them back in this way. It is safe.