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Postings from July 2005
On Thu, 21 Jul 2005, "TSa (Thomas Sandlaß)" wrote:
> Matthew Hodgson wrote:
>> I guess $::('Foo') was a bad example - $Foo="Foo"; $::($Foo) would have
>> been better at illustrating my point - which was that if $::($Foo)
>> searches outwards through namespace for a variable whose name is held in
>> $Foo, then $::Foo should end up referring to the same variable.
>
> Let me restate that in my own words. You mean that a symbolic runtime
> lookup $::($Foo) with the value of $Foo at that time shall be cached
> in the immediatly surrounding namespace and that cached ref is then
> accessable through the syntax $::Foo?
Hm, I seem to be making a bit of a pigs ear of explaining myself here, but
thank you for bearing with me. What I was trying to confirm was that
if you create a variable in your immediately surrounding namespace:
$*Main::foo = 'bar'; # (assuming you are in the default namespace)
and a variable containing the string 'foo':
my $varname = 'foo';
then the principle of least surprise suggests to me that the result of
evaluating $::($varname) should be identical to that of evaluating $::foo.
I wasn't getting hung up on whether $::($varname) should somehow be cached
to avoid a dynamic lookup based on the current value of $varname every
time. And I assume that if $*Main::foo hadn't been created, assigning to
$::($varname) would create it as expected (again, without any caching of
$varname).
My confusion initially stemmed from chat on #perl6 about $::Foo and
$::('Foo') being Very Different Things - and the fact that there was ever
any confusion over whether $::foo was your 'closest' $foo variable or
something else.
> BTW, I wonder if $::() means $::($_) :)
hehe; that would almost be nice... :)
>> Otherwise the two $::... forms would be horribly confusingly different
>
> Sorry, they are the same thing: namespace lookup. But without ::() the
> compiler does it at compile time for bareword resolving. Without a sigil
> in front the result can be used where a type is expected:
>
> for ("blahh", "fasel", "blubber") -> $name
> {
>>> ($name).new;
> }
>
> We can consider the equivalence of $foo and $::foo as TIMTOWTWI.
> I dought that assigning two different meanings just because their
> are two syntactical forms is a good idea.
Fantastic - all my fears are allayed, then. $::foo is $::('foo') is $foo
(assuming it hasn't been our'd or my'd), and all is well in the world.
>> [lest] I (and other future legions of newbies) would despair. :)
>
> You consider yourself a 'legion of newbies' ;)
Well, earlier I may have been legion, but I think i've regained my karmic
balance a bit now... ;)
cheers;
M.
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