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Postings from September 2011
We have a moderately well-known ambiguity between Foo::Bar being
a bareword package name and being a call to a subroutine. Simple
illustration, under Devel::REPL:
$ use feature "say";
$ sub Foo::Bar::say { say "Foo::Bar::say(@_)" }
$ Foo::Bar->say(123);
Foo::Bar::say(Foo::Bar 123)
1$
$ sub Wibble::say { say "Wibble::say(@_)" }
$ sub Foo::Bar { bless({}, "Wibble") }
$ Foo::Bar->say(123);
Wibble::say(Wibble=HASH(0x965d8f4) 123)
1$
The fashionable way to disambiguate this is to add a trailing :: to
the bareword:
$ Foo::Bar::->say(123);
Foo::Bar::say(Foo::Bar 123)
1$
So 'Foo::Bar' prefers the subroutine interpretation, but 'Foo::Bar::'
is always the package name string. However, there's also a third thing
that 'Foo::Bar' can mean:
$ open(\*Foo::Bar, ">&STDOUT");
1$
$ Foo::Bar->say(123);
Wibble::say(Wibble=HASH(0x9664bd0) 123)
1$
$ Foo::Bar::->say(123);
123
1$
$
'Foo::Bar' still prefers to be a sub call, but 'Foo::Bar::' is now
referring to the filehandle in preference to the package. And that
can't be fixed by using a more obvious string syntax:
$ "Foo::Bar"->say(123);
123
1$
'Foo::Bar::' is still evaluating as a string, just like '"Foo::Bar"'.
The ambiguity here arises at method dispatch time, where the string
invocant is preferentially interpreted as referring to the filehandle.
It looks as if we currently have *no* unambiguous way to call class
methods. Some people have been calling for the option to refer
to a package by its stash in Perl space, particularly to allow for
anonymous classes. I think this issue provides another good reason to
move towards that sort of system. As I pointed out yesterday on IRC,
there's inevitable pain if we break the current tacit guarantee that every
class has an absolute name that can be used to look it up. I think I
didn't make clear, though, that I do think the gain is worth this effort.
I'm dubious about using stashes themselves, as they currently exist,
as the core class metaobject. I think the visible metaobject should
be visibly of a different type from hashes. That's not a major hassle:
stashes are already somewhat more magical than ordinary hashes.
-zefram
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