John Siracusa asked:
Has there been any discussion of how to create code in Perl 6 that's there
under some conditions, but not there under others? I'm thinking of the
spiritual equivalent of #ifdef, only Perlish.
In Perl 5, there were many attempts to use such a feature for debugging and
assertions. What everyone wanted to do was write code like this:
debug("Doing foo with $bar and $baz");
foo($bar, $baz);
And then have the entire call to debug() just plain disappear when the
program was run with a certain flag, or when a particular constant was set,
or whatever. The closest we got in Perl 5, AFAIK, was stuff this:
use constant DEBUG => 0;
...
debug("Doing foo with $bar and $baz") if DEBUG;
foo($bar, $baz);
But all those "if DEBUG"s or "DEBUG &&"s were a pain. So I'm wondering what
the solution will be in Perl 6.
Something like this:
module Debug;
my $debugging = 1;
method import ($debug) { $debguuging = $debug }
sub debug is immediate is exported (@message) {
return $debugging ?? { print $*STDERR: @message; } :: {;}
}
then:
use Debug;
debug("Doing foo with $bar and $baz");
and to deactivate the debug statements:
use Debug 0;
debug("Doing foo with $bar and $baz");
"Immediate" subroutines are executed as soon as they are parsed (i.e. they're
like named BEGIN blocks).
Returning a closure/block from an immediate sub called in a void context
(as C<debug> is in the example above) causes the immediate sub call to be
replaced -- during compilation! -- by the returned closure/block.
Voila! Perl 6 is its own macro language.
Damian
