Any ideas on how to handle this with the 'is' keyword? I was reading the
slashdot comments to Exegesis II, and this seemed to be the one issue that had
merit. A couple of the posters bemoaned the fact that they were debugging PL/I
about 25 years ago, and had code that depended on some obscure property being
set somewhere earlier, which affected the code 1200 lines later.
I could see that being a problem:
undef $fh;
$fh is true;
... 1200 lines later...
if ($fh) { print "HERE!!!\n"; }
In other words, 'is' seems to me to be a generous helping of action at a
distance. Unless its somehow easily queryable/managable. Is dumper going to
become a built in keyword to handle this sort of thing?
Also, what's the difference between a 'property' and an 'attribute', ie, are:
$fh is true;
and
$fh.true(1);
synonyms? Can 'undef' valued thingys have properties and functions? And are the
traditional data elements of a scalar (like value) simply attributes of a
universal scalar object?
And if all of the above is true, what does this do to the size of the internal
representation of a scalar?
Ed
