Larry~
On 7/27/05, Larry Wall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 27, 2005 at 08:01:25PM +0800, Autrijus Tang wrote:
> : On Fri, Jul 22, 2005 at 03:40:34PM -0700, Larry Wall wrote:
> : > I dunno. I'm inclined to say that it should default to Item|Pair, and
> : > let people say Any explicitly if they really want to suppress
> autothreading.
> : > Otherwise conditionals and switches are going to behave oddly in the
> : > presence of "accidental" junctions.
> :
> : Okay. However, in that view, I suspect many builtins will be defined on
> : Item|Pair, for example &perl, &clone, &id, as well as various coercion
> : builtins. Considering that builtins are Code objects but not Routines,
> : maybe they, too, should default to Item|Pair -- except the ones that
> : operates on junctions, of course.
> :
> : This leads me to think that maybe users don't really need to write down
> : the two junctive types, under the hierarchy below:
> :
> : - Object
> : - Any
> : - Item
> : - ...pretty much everything
> : - Pair
> : - Junction
> : - num, int, str...
> :
> : Since junctions are still boxed objects, having the Object type to
> : effectively mean Any|Junction seems natural ("everything is an object").
> :
> : Also, since Any unifies Item and Pair, the rule for implicit types of
> : argument becomes:
> :
> : sub ($x) { } # Item $x
> : -> $x { } # Any $x - i.e. Item|Pair but not Junction
> : { $^x } # Any $x - i.e. Item|Pair but not Junction
> :
> : Does this sound sane?
>
> Yes. The only thing I don't like about it is that any() isn't an Any.
> Maybe we should rename Any to Atom. Then maybe swap Item with Atom,
> since in colloquial English you can say "that pair of people are
> an item." That would give us:
>
> - Object
> - Item
> - Atom
> - ...pretty much everything
> - Pair
> - Junction
> - num, int, str...
>
> which nicely distinguishes Item from Junction. On the other hand,
> I actually kinda dislike the word "Atom" for common use (too much
> exposure to Lisp, I guess), so maybe we just want
>
> - Object
> - Mumble
> - Item
> - ...pretty much everything
> - Pair
> - Junction
> - num, int, str...
>
> where Mumble is something like Atom/NonJunction/Unit/Scalar/[your ad here].
While we are talking about words... I dislike having Object encompass
Juction. I get the feeling that some people will write functions that
take Objects and not expect Junctions to slip in. I suppose that
could be one of those hurdles that developers just have to jump, but
it doesn't feel like it should be.
Matt
--
"Computer Science is merely the post-Turing Decline of Formal Systems Theory."
-Stan Kelly-Bootle, The Devil's DP Dictionary
