Re: RFC 171 (v1) my Dog $spot should call a constructor implicitly

[Michael Fowler]

On Tue, Aug 29, 2000 at 12:57:07PM -0700, Matt Youell wrote:
> So perhaps sometimes in Perl we could say:
> 
>     my Dog $spot = undef;    # Automagically knows to be a Dog ref instead
> of a Dog object because of the undef.
>     if ($age > 12) {
>          $spot = new Doberman();
>      } else {
>          $spot = new Corgi();
>      }

That's a little too special-case and magical for my tastes.  What if the
programmer really wants to call the constructor with an undef argument?  Or
what if the programmer calls my Dog $spot = $foo, expecting $foo to be
defined, but it isn't?  That would end up being a difficult to trace bug.


Michael
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