develooper Front page | perl.perl6.internals | Postings from July 2002

Re: Mutable vs immutable strings

Thread Previous | Thread Next
From:
Dan Sugalski
Date:
July 11, 2002 10:13
Subject:
Re: Mutable vs immutable strings
Message ID:
a05111b1bb9536bcdec0f@[63.120.19.221]
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 drunk

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