On Monday, November 11, 2002, at 02:19 AM, Damian Conway wrote:
One of the reasons I like C<cached> is because it does specifyAmen. The more abstract or metaphorical the name, the more difficult it is to be really sure of what it does. Of the choices, "cached" seems by far the most self-explanatory. If we used "pure", we'd have to teach people what "pure" means, which would be much harder than teaching them what "cached" means.
exactly the way the subroutine is to behave (i.e. be called the first time,
and not called every subsequent time the same arguments are supplied). So
I can do nasty^H^H^H^H^Hhandy things like giving the sub side-effects, in
the sure knowledge that they won't be invoked more than once.
With C<pure> I can never be sure what optimizations the compiler is
or isn't going to make, or even whether those optimzations will be the
same from platform to platform [*]. So I can never be sure what the
precise behaviour of my sub will be. :-(
MikeL
