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.Thread Previous | Thread Next