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Postings from May 2000
"Andreas J. Koenig" wrote:
[snipped a lot of CPAN related stuff]
> I'd say for a pragma like readonly, you should seek to get approval
> from P5P. And I'd recommend scanning the archives because I recall,
> there were other proposals for how a readonly.pm should look like (Hi,
> Graham!). I believe, a readonly pragma is a good idea, and if the
> experts agree with your implementation, this would be a very good
> thing.
[snip]
(I didn't have any luck scanning the archives.)
I wanted to make I<scalars> readonly something that currently must be
done with this syntax:
use vars '$BASE_PATH' ;
*BASE_PATH = \'/usr/local/lib/projectx' ;
(or via a tie which involves significant overhead).
Of course you can create subroutines via use constant that can be used
like constant scalars in many contexts, but they are I<not> constant
scalars.
Examples:
use readonly '$BASE_PATH' => '/usr/local/lib/projectx' ;
use constant BASE_PATH => '/usr/local/lib/projectx' ;
print "path: $BASE_PATH\n" ; # Since its a scalar use as-is
print "path: @{[BASE_PATH]}\n" ; # For beginners?
$base = $Path{$BASE_PATH} ; # No prob.
$base = $Path{BASE_PATH} ; # Oops, perl used literal 'BASE_PATH'
# Could use &BASE_PATH or BASE_PATH() instead.
$BASE_PATH = 4 ;
Fails with: Modification of a read-only value attempted
BASE_PATH = 4 ;
Fails with: Can't modify subroutine entry in scalar assignment
The readonly pragma as currently implemented will also take a list of
readonly's:
use readonly
'$MAX_LINE_LEN' => 80,
'$MAX_LINES' => 66,
'$MAX_HEADLINES' => 2,
'$MAX_FOOTLINES' => 3,
; # dozens more etc.
The $ could be made optional but I included it 'cos I wanted usage to be
consistent throughout.
Of course what I'd really like is for readonlys to be part of the
language itself... but my C isn't up to it (& the more I use Perl the
more other languages seem like too much work before you even get to the
problem you want to solve...)
Since I've never proposed a pragma before I have no idea what happens?
If readonly.pm is not approved I'm in a dilemma because on the one hand
it is a pragma & therefore should be all lowercase & on the other hand
all lowercase names are reserved the std distribution...
BTW the code is here:
http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-authors/id/S/SU/SUMMER/
_______________________________________________
Mark Summerfield http://www.perlpress.com
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