In general, the idea of initialized doesn't mean a lot in Raku, at least
not at the language level.
At any given time, any variable has a value. By default, if you've typed a
variable, it's initially set to the type itself (Any is the default type,
so the default default value). The only exceptions are native types which
are either 0 or the empty string, depending, or if you've added a trait to
override the default value. Note the following, which may be a bit
surprising to you:
my Int $a;
my $b = Int;
my $c;
say $a === $b === Int; # True
say $c === $a; # False
$c's value here is (Any), but both $a and $b are (Int).
.new calls self.bless, which handles all of the allocation stuff behind the
scenes, but —importantly— each attribute, like any variable, will always
have a value (it just might not be defined), such that
class Foo {
has Rat $.bar;
}
say Foo.new.bar === Rat; # True
say Foo.new.bar.defined; # False
In some classes, undefined values for those attributes may not make sense,
and each can make its own decisions how to handle when lacking defined
values.
Hope that makes sense,
Matéu
On Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 19:10 Peter Scott <pe...@psdt.com> wrote:
> Yes. I'm agnostic on this point, but there was a time when some prominent
> Perl contributors were dogmatic about it and I didn't know how widespread
> it was.
>
> Peter
>
> On 7/19/2021 10:06 AM, Vadim Belman wrote:
>
>
> Let me guess. The school prohibits object self-initialization? It has to
> be done by external code?
>
> Best regards,
> Vadim Belman
>
> On Jul 19, 2021, at 1:00 PM, Peter Scott <pe...@psdt.com> wrote:
>
> On 7/19/2021 1:24 AM, Elizabeth Mattijsen wrote:
>
> If .new wouldn't initialize a type to its basic instantiation, what would
> be the point of .new then?
>
> FWIW, the same goes for:
>
> dd Int.new; # 0
> dd Num.new; # 0e0
> dd Complex.new; # <0+0i>
> dd Str.new; # ""
>
> If you want to leave it undefined, don't call .new on it?
>
> *confused*
>
>
> Only that there's a vocal school of thought in O-O that says new() should
> only allocate memory and never put anything in there. Now I know that Raku
> doesn't subscribe to that I have no problem.
>
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
>
>
>
