On Sun, 19 Jan 2003 11:18, Joseph F. Ryan wrote: > Ignorant of what? Surely we shouldn't assume that we're all > ignorant of Perl?
Ignorant of the untold number of ways things could be done better. Assuming the universe has an infinite number of possibilities, we have 0% of the expressive space of programming languages covered. But that's not important right now. Now, I know that there was an extensive RFC process for Perl 6. But perhaps there are still simple ideas that have not been entered into the pot yet; after all, like minds think alike. And pot mind like I think into, hmm? To me what's missing stands out like a sore thumb - that making sure a package/class definition can express all the same primitive elements used by the current emerged standard of modelling data sets - UML. So you could say, eg two classes that have a composite, ordered, one to many relationship between each other, and have that information both accessible at run time to persistence layers and control the defaults of how the object behaves. Or an aggregate many to many relationship. Or a simple one to one relationship. You might correctly say, if you make the language flexible enough then you are free to build any number of these systems that work in any number of different ways. But if you ask me, they'll all be a hack until the underlying principles are isolated, and included as keywords, modifiers or whatever it takes to extend the act of defining a class. OO Code is; Classes, Attributes, Methods and Associations. How many of these elements does Perl deal in? And don't take offence at being called an amateur - the word literally means `for the love of it'. -- Sam Vilain, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thesaurus: ancient reptile with an excellent vocabulary
