On Jul 16, 2004, at 4:35 PM, John Siracusa wrote:
As for this:
$obj->start_date(format => '%B %d %Y at %T')
being nothing more than syntactic sugar for this:
$obj->start_date->strftime('%B %d %Y at %T')
Yes, that's my argument against it. And it's why dates are such a PITA in Bricolage.
the first one gives me a bit more flexibility if, say, I decide to add new
format specifiers. As it turns out, that's just what I did, and I didn't
end up with a mix of "old style" $obj->start_date->strftime(...) calls and
"new style" $obj->start_date(format => ...) calls when I did it.
I would have subclasses DateTime to add the new format specifiers.
But honestly, 99.9% of my get/set methods don't take any args in the "get"
case. I really, really like the cleanliness of using the same method name
for both. The only thing that bothers me at all is the runtime overhead of
arg checking, but as I mentioned before, even that will go away when
efficient multimethod dispatch arrives in Perl 6.
Yes, this is the thing. Two methods are actually a lighter weight at run time than one. But I too like having a single method, as it fees much more like I'm using an attribute than a method.
In the "date" get/set case in Perl 6, I'd have 3 methods with the same name
but three different signatures: "no args", "named args", and "a single
string arg") Sorry if I can't recall the Perl 6 signature syntax off the
top of my head... ;)
Mmmm...multimethods. :-)
David
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