On Mon, Nov 11, 2002 at 11:48:06PM -0600, Me wrote:
: Are placeholders only usable with anonymous
: subs, or named subs too?
Placeholders are not intended for use with named subs, since named
subs have a way of naming their parameters in a more readable fashion.
However, it may well fall out that if you say
sub foo { $^b <=> $^a }
it would effectively mean the same thing as
sub foo ($a, $b) { $b <=> $a }
But note that there's no placeholder equivalent for a forward declaration:
sub foo ($a, $b) { ... }
: Switching briefly to currying, can one curry
: a method?
Hmm. We can allow what makes sense. I suppose a class should be
allowed to curry one of its own methods on any non-invocant parameter,
since that's just equivalent to defining a new method in the same class.
(Generally, outside of a class, if you want to make the signatures of
the methods look different, the standard way is to derive a new class.)
Currying on the invocant is different, since it essentially turns
a method into a subroutine, and treats a class as a mere module.
This could be construed as antisocial. However, as a special case,
one might often want to curry a set of methods to assume a particular
invocant. But the syntax for that should probably involve the class
rather than the individual methods. Saying
use DB_Connection.assuming(self => new DB_Connection)
could import all of DB_Connection's public methods into the current
class or module as subroutines, and then you don't have to do the
sort of I'm-a-class-no-I'm-a-module shenanigans that modules like
CGI currently do.
Larry
