This and other RFCs are available on the web at http://dev.perl.org/rfc/ =head1 TITLE Overloadable parentheses for objects =head1 VERSION Maintainer: pdl-porters team <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: 16 Aug 2000 Last Modified: 30 Sep 2000 Mailing List: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Number: 115 Version: 3 Status: Frozen =head1 DISCUSSION There was hardly any response to this RFC. That can be interpreted in a number of ways C<;)>. RFC 231 suggests an alternative way to get what we tried to get from this RFC: Syntactical ease of making slices of multidim array objects. RFC 231 suggests $a->[1..3; 4] * $b->[]; >From our point of view this is not too bad but we would like to get rid of the requirement for C<-E<gt>>. An extended C<tie> mechanism with possibility of overloaded operations on those arrays might do it. But then again, if we get all those polymorphic methods we could also allow the one suggested by this RFC -- TIMTOWTDI. =head1 ABSTRACT This RFC proposes syntactic support for a polymorphic method that can be defined for blessed references. It would allow the parentheses C<()> to be used for a variety of convenient syntaxes for objects. This is principally motivated by a need of PDL for a simple syntax of PDL object slicing. =head1 DESCRIPTION =head2 Motivation Currently, PDL objects have to use quite an unwieldy syntax for the all important slicing and indexing. In perl5 the syntax is $n1 = $n-1; # since we need to stringify $y = $x->slice("0:$n1:4"); $y = $x->slice("0:${\($n-1)}:4"); # even more horrible This should be contrasted with the less cluttered syntax offered by numerical Python and commercial systems such as Matlab and IDL: y = x[0:n-1:4]; In perl we desire to say: $y = $x(0:$n-1,4); # or, depending on the choice of separator $y = $x(0:$n-1;4); # see also RFC 169 Note that we need to keep l-value subs in perl6 to avoid related types of syntactical clumsiness if C<$x()> can invoke a subroutine (see below). $x(0:$n-1:4) *= 2; should be allowed, as well as the long form $x->slice(0:$n-1:4) *= 2; L<RFC 81> and related RFCs propose introducing ranges as part of the syntax cleanup, this RFC proposes C<()> overloading for objects. =head2 Overloading C<()>'s If classes allowed the definition of a method that is invoked with a syntax akin to one used with sub refs (but without the need for the C<&> dereferencing) we could have the cake and eat it. The parentheses method notion seems general enough to be useful for other classes. =head2 Examples: A possible scenario could be as follows. The class PDL defines a default method that is invoked when a syntax like $<variable_name>(args) is used, where C<$E<lt>variable_nameE<gt>> is supposed to be an instance of the class in question (here PDL). The PDL package would contain the definition of the method C<PARENTHESES> (a polymorphic method along the lines of RFC 159): package PDL; .... sub PARENTHESES { my $this = shift; $this->slice(@_); } This would allow for the creation of a variety of powerful syntaxes for different kinds of objects. For example in PDL we might wish to use C<()> to slice by index value and in a derived class PDL::World C<()> would slice by physical real-value coordinate. One could think of this as saying that C<()> is an operators which can be overloaded. Note that we still would like to have such a feature even if Perl 6 provided its own multi-dim array type. It would give us the freedom to provide an object oriented interface to these arrays and/or derive classes from it I<and> have convenient slicing syntax. =head1 IMPLEMENTATION Changes to the parser to allow the new syntax. We are not aware of any other conflicts with existing or proposed language features. =head1 SEE ALSO RFC 159: True Polymorphic Objects RFC 117: Perl syntax support for ranges RFC 81: Lazily evaluated list generation functions RFC 169: Proposed syntax for matrix element access and slicing RFC 231: Data: Multi-dimensional arrays/hashes and slices L<PDL> (http://pdl.sourceforge.net/PDLdocs) http://pdl.perl.org Numerical Python: http://starship.python.net/~da/numtut/
