On Thu, 29 Aug 2002, Steffen Mueller wrote: : Nicholas Clark wrote: : [...] : > If the compiler were able to see that my Date $bday = 'June 25, 2002'; : > is one statement that both types $bday as Date, and then assigns a : > constant to it, is it possible to do the conversion of that constant : > to a constant $bday object at compile time? (and hence get compile : > time checking) Without affecting general run time behaviour. : : While that may be possible (I can't tell, I gladly take Dan's word for it), : it doesn't make much sense IMHO. It means that you can only initialize those : objects with constants. That's not a problem for people who know Perl well, : but it is going to be one hell of a confusion for anybody learning Perl. I : can see people whining on clpm why they can't do "my Dog $rex = : sub_returning_string();". Again IMHO, taking Perl's flexibility in *some* : cases is much worse than making it Java.
We're not going to define it so they can only initialize with constants. That would be silly. I think Dan is talking about the case where we can detect that it is a constant at compile time. As such, it's just constant folding, on the assumption that we also know the constructor isn't going to change. Again, though, assignment to a normal variable is unlikely to invoke a constructor in any case. Larry
