Re: A question about types

[Daniel Dai <ji...@yahoo-inc.com>]

bytearray can be any data type including WritableComparable. Just 
declare your EvalFunc to return bytearray, and in the runtime, feed 
WritableComparable to Pig. Pig should be able to deal with it.

Daniel

On 05/31/2011 10:30 AM, Jonathan Coveney wrote:
> Disclaimer: I'm still learning my way around the Pig and Hadoop internals,
> so this question is aimed at better understanding that and some of the pig
> design choices...
>
> Is there a reason why in Pig we are restricted to a set of types (roughly
> corresponding to types in java), instead of having an abstract type like in
> Hadoop ie Writable or WritableComparable? I guess I got to thinking about
> this when thinking about the Algebraic interface... in Hadoop if you want to
> have some crazy intermediate objects, you can do that easily as long as they
> are serializable (ie Writable, and WritableComparable if they are going to
> the reducer in the shuffle). In fact, in Hadoop there is no notion of some
> special class of objects which we work with -- everything is simply Writable
> or WritableComparable. In Pig we are more limited, and I was just thinking
> about why that needs to be the case. Is there any reason why we can't have
> abstract types at the same level as String or Integer? My guess would be it
> has to do with how these objects are treated internally, but beyond that am
> not sure.
>
> Thanks for helping me think about this
> Jon