On Jan 18, 2006, at 10:41 PM, Trey Harris wrote:
Excuse my ignorance of the finer points, but I thought the reason for bless's continued existence was so that the same sort of brilliant OO experimentation that Damian and others have done with pure Perl 5 can continue to be done in pure Perl 6 without having to hack p6opaque?
Actually &bless only partially plays a role in all those whacky things which so many whacky people have done with Perl 5. Without AUTOLOAD, symbol table hacking and closures, &bless would not be that exciting.
However, given a proper MOP (meta-object-protocol) the amount of Object Oriented experimentation which will be possible in Perl 6 will far exceed what you can do in Perl 5. Not to mention that it will also be type-safe and far more reliable (read: you could *actually* use it in production).
And not to put down all of the brilliant OO experimentation that has been done in Perl 5, but it is not always as cutting edge as one might think. A good amount of the really crazy cutting edge OO work is being done with either Smalltalk or CLOS and the fact they both have well defined and studied MOPs is probably a major reason for that.
Stevan
