At 9:54 AM -0400 7/11/02, Clark C . Evans wrote: >On Wed, Jul 10, 2002 at 11:21:10AM -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote: >| I'm not sure that the place to enforce read-onlyness is at the >| string/buffer level. Doing it at the PMC level is more likely the >| right place to do it. > >Therefore, "read-onlyness" would be a property of any ole >object and not just strings? Yes. >If so, I think this is a >great direction; as long as it is a mechanism shared by >each language binding. For YAML serializations, it would >insist that each mapping key is "read-only". Perfect. Yes. There's a standard set of properties and, while individual languages can call them whatever the heck they want, const-ness is const-ness regardless. >This brings up another topic. Will parrot have reflection >or must this be done at the application level? It will have reflection, introspection, and Deep Meditative Capabilities. >It would be >very nice to have reflection down in the parrot guts so that >we can write serialization tools that operate while being >oblivious to the current language (or perhaps this is a bit >too much... just musing here). Serialization will require a bit more work than plain introspection can guarantee, since there's nothing stopping someone from writing a PMC class that stores random arbitrary data in a buffer and uses it in ways that Parrot has no real clue about. There were serialization/deserialization in the PMC vtables at one point, but that's gone. I think I may add it back in, though of course no PMC is required to provide them. -- Dan --------------------------------------"it's like this"------------------- Dan Sugalski even samurai dan@sidhe.org have teddy bears and even teddy bears get drunkThread Previous | Thread Next