develooper Front page | perl.perl5.porters | Postings from September 2015

Re: smartmatch needs your eyes

Thread Previous | Thread Next
From:
Ricardo Signes
Date:
September 12, 2015 01:37
Subject:
Re: smartmatch needs your eyes
Message ID:
20150912013747.GA30372@cancer.codesimply.com
* Aristotle Pagaltzis <pagaltzis@gmx.de> [2015-09-11T17:25:04]
> However, there is one case for it: if `when` is defined in terms of
> smartmatch, then these rules would allow writing e.g.
> 
>     given ($mode) {
>         when ('enable')  { ... }
>         when ('disable') { ... }
>         # ...
>     }

I have a lot of sympathy for this position, and maybe I'd say I'm on the fence,
but I lean heavily to not doing it (yet) because I start to lose my mind when
these differ in behavior so radically:

  my $x = 1;
  ... when 1;
  ... when $x;

I would be happy to be convinced, here, so have at me!  Perhaps the real issue
is documenting this in a way that makes the above not surprising, even if you
only read the first few lines of the docs.  I'm not sure.

* Aristotle Pagaltzis <pagaltzis@gmx.de> [2015-09-11T18:04:29]
> That said, I think this could be acceptable, but for one thing: that it
> uses the same overload method for $x ~~ $obj as for $obj ~~ $x.

Ugh, tell me about it.  When I wrote the ~~ overloads, I was unhappy by the
crap needed.  Maybe we should add ~~x and x~~.  Using the third arg to the
overload sub (a) is tedious (b) will lead to mistakes (c) makes the feature
feel unnatural.

With x~~ and ~~x, ~~ could become a deprecated fallback during the transition.

Writing sample code that overloaded ~~ really made this clear.  (See my
previous post.)

> > but it has the practical benefit of keeping autodie working.
> [...]
> But if I understand the problem correctly, it’s not the code of autodie
> itself, it’s the interface that autodie has advertised so far, i.e. the
> cost we’re talking about isn’t patching autodie itself, it is patching
> all of the users of the autodie smartmatch interface. Is that correct?

That is correct.  autodie enthusiastically embraced ~~, encourating users to
write:

  given ($@) {
    when (undef)   { say "No error";                    }
    when ('open')  { say "Error from open";             }
    when (':io')   { say "Non-open, IO error.";         }
    when (':all')  { say "All other autodie errors."    }
    default        { say "Not an autodie error at all." }
  }

-- 
rjbs

Thread Previous | Thread Next


nntp.perl.org: Perl Programming lists via nntp and http.
Comments to Ask Bjørn Hansen at ask@perl.org | Group listing | About