On Tue, 29 Oct 2002 14:19:59 -0800, Paul Johnson wrote: > So I would like to see able to tag arbitrary information onto just about > everything, including files, packages, classes, subroutines, blocks, control > structures, statements, lines, expressions, variables and whatever else I've > forgotten about. Properties can be attached to some of these. Can we > generalise this at all?
> Of course, the applicability of this is not limited to code coverage, so it > would be nice to have something as general and multi purpose as possible. > But I don't want language support for saying that, that seems to be a problem > for the applications that want the data, although I'd be glad to be shown that > I am wrong and that the language can support that in a clean and concise way. > Instead, I just want somewhere to hang arbitrary data. Dan started a thread about bytecode in p6i: http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-internals@;perl.org/msg13377.html I jumped on the "arbitrary metadata" soapbox, and finally distilled my thoughts down to this: http://archive.develooper.com/perl6-internals@;perl.org/msg13443.html It sounds like we're thinking along the same lines. This would be very handy for introspective tools (code coverage, refactoring browsers, IDEs...). -- c