First of all: Damian, thank you for putting this together. This is a
really good way to dispell the concerns/doubts/pick-a-word that people
(including myself) have been having about whether Perl6 would be the
language that we all know and love.
There was a great deal of stuff in there and I for one am going to need
some time to digest it. My initial reactions are as follows: at first I
was alarmed and a bit appalled at a lot of the changes...e.g., the
'HASH $tree is rw' parameter declaration. "Jesus," I thought "if I wanted
a typed languaged, I'd use C++." The more I read, however, the more I
became convinced that these were actually elegant Perlisms...you can have
exactly as much freedom as you want, if you carry the responsibility for
it. Alternatively, you can have Perl do more of the work for you, if you
are willing to live with constraints. Elegant. Perlish. Good.
The only questions I have at this point are:
- Is there a way to declare a property constant/final/choose your
keyword?
- Is there a way to do a read-only access on a property?
- A while ago, someone suggested that the word 'has' be an alias
for 'is', so that when you roll your own properties, you could write
more-grammatically-correct statements such as "my $var has
Colors(3)". Since 'are' is being considered as a synonym, is there a
possibility that 'has' will make it too?
- Might it be possible to make properties prefix-able when being
used with types, so that it would be possible to say 'my constant int $foo
= 0;' ?? It's a minor point, but it would make it easier for people from
C-based languages to transfer (whether that's enough of a reason is a
separate question.) I understand it would be difficult, since properties
work off the 'is' keyword, which returns its left arg; still, I don't see
why this is harder (from a programming view) than making 'if' and 'unless'
capable of prefix or postfix usage.
Dave
