Re: [OT] accessors pragma

[Steve Purkis]

On Tuesday, September 16, 2003, at 09:51  pm, Damian Conway wrote:

For what it's worth...

Perl 6 classes will autogenerate accessors that return the underlying 
attribute itself as an lvalue:

        class DogTag {
                has $.name is public;
                has $.rank is public;
                has $.serial is readonly;
                has @.medals is public;
                
                submethod BUILD ($id) { $.serial = $id }
                method title () { return "$.rank $.name" }
        }
	my $grunt = DogTag.new(71625371);

        $grunt.name = "Pyle";
        $grunt.rank = "Private";
	print "$grunt.title ($grunt.serial)\n";

And Perl 6 supports "chaining" of accessors using $_ and the unary dot 
operator, not return values:

        given $grunt {
                .name = "Patton";
                .rank = "General";
                push .medals, "Purple heart";
        }
Hmm, that's very similar in spirit to the 'classic' form.

Will generated accessors be overridable?  I can see how 'given' would 
be useful, but what if I wanted to say this:

        $grunt.name( "Patton" )
              .rank( "General" )
              .add_medal( "Purple heart" );
And have you considered a twisted lvalue form like:

        $grunt.name = "Patton"
              .rank = "General"
              .medals += ("Purple heart");
though that's prolly difficult to support.. ;)

-Steve