On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 04:53:46PM -0500, Garrett Goebel wrote:
> Piers Cawley has written a nice article entitled: "Perl 6 : Not Just For
> Damians".
I had missed what unary . really did, and this explained it to me. I'm
now much more excited about it as a "with"-like operator.
It does make me think, though... Would it make sense to have an
accessor operator? For example, in Perl5 I would do this:
sub foo {
my $self = shift;
my $old = $self->{foo};
# So $obj->foo(undef) will work
if (@_) {
$self->{foo} = shift @_;
}
return $old;
}
In Perl6 with the unary ., that becomes:
sub .foo (*@args) {
my $old = $.{foo};
# So $obj.foo(undef) will work
$.{foo} = shift @args if @args;
return $old;
}
So, since this is likely to be fairly common, could we perhaps have
a shortcut?
sub .{foo} () {}
Of course, this is the simple case. In reality, the transformation
would be:
sub .{NAME} () BLOCK
which becomes
sub .NAME (*@args) {
BLOCK
my $old = $.{NAME};
$.{foo} = shift @args if @args;
return $old;
}
The syntax might not be wise. I dunno how I feel about YAUB
(Yet Another Use of Braces). Perhaps some syntax like:
accessor .NAME () BLOCK
But the .{method} syntax does seem to be a very ovious meaning, given
what .{NAME} is going to mean inside of the method.
Then again, we could call it all quits and come up with a naming
convention that allows some members to be automatically exported
as methods, and others to be withheld.
--
Aaron Sherman
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"Write your letters in the sand for the day I'll take your hand
In the land that our grandchildren knew." -Queen/_'39_
