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Postings from May 2000
Tom, Tom Christiansen wrote: [snip] > > const $READONLY = 99 ; # OR use readonly '$READONLY' => 99 ; > > *MYREADONLY = \'splat!' ; > > print $READONLY ; # Yep, prints "splat!" and no warnings > > >Looks like you can't have genuinely readonly scalars in perl unless you > >use ties... > > Why should this be an issue? Just because you can't diddle $foo doesn't > mean you can't diddle the *foo typeglob. [snip] Its not that I don't want to be able to mess with *foo - that's useful; it is just that I really want to have constants that will stay that way and still can't find a good way of doing it. > Coming soon from a Larry near you: > > At some point, we'll enable the use of a C<constant> attribute > on variable declarations: > > my $PI : constant = 4 * atan2(1,1); > > This has all the advantages of being a variable rather than a > subroutine. It has all the disadvantages of not being implemented yet. > > --tom That's good news to me. Over the years all my perl 'annoyances' have evaporated as I learnt more, except for not being able to have decent constants. (Although new ones have come along of course:) The first thing I'd like to be able to do is export my constants... which I can't do with my's. I feel that constants do need to be exportable to be fully useful. (See my reply to Ian Phillipps, following, for a note on that.) _______________________________________________ Mark Summerfield http://www.perlpress.com