darren chamberlain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>James G Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said something to this effect on 07/03/2001:
>> sub use : immediate {
>> # do stuff here if logging
>> return CORE::use(@_);
>> }
>
>To go OT here, what would 'immediate' be doing here, if Perl
>supported it?
It would be run at compile time when the compiler ran into it
instead of waiting for run-time. Basically, the following
invocations of &foo and &bar would be equivalent. The
`immediate' modifier could wrap an implicit BEGIN { } around any
invocation of the subroutine.
sub bar { do something; }
sub foo : immediate {
bar(@_);
}
foo($a, $b);
BEGIN {
bar($a, $b);
}
This is used in FORTH to support such things as if-then-else and
do-while constructs since they are just entries in the dictionary
like any other definition. FORTH actually uses it to build up
the entire language since there are no reserved words.
--
James Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, 979-862-3725
Texas A&M CIS Operating Systems Group, Unix
