A fellow Perlie (NOT on this list) was ruminating on the idea of generalizing the "Taint" capability into a first-class part of the language. Something like allowing variables to log their provenance, for later examination.
I came up with two possible approaches for this. One would act a bit like the D (in DTrace) way of doing "conditional traces". Another would act a bit like the "watchpoints" I've seen in a debugger or three.
In any case, one way of doing something like this in Perl might be to have the ability to register exceptions for a range of quite ordinary behavior, such as entering or leaving a statement, setting or even accessing a variable, etc.
I realize that this would slow the program down radically, but I could see it being useful in tracking down oddball problems.
-r
On a vaguely-related topic, I am reminded of another friend's desire to be able to redefine floating point values as quartets of values. Each operation would then be done using all possible rounding options (in the IEEE standard) and the results checked for "significant" variations. If anyone knows of a cute way to do this in Perl 6, I'd be happy to hear about it... -- email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; phone: +1 650-873-7841 http://www.cfcl.com - Canta Forda Computer Laboratory http://www.cfcl.com/Meta - The FreeBSD Browser, Meta Project, etc. http://www.ptf.com/dossier - Prime Time Freeware's DOSSIER series
