On 9/2/00 11:34 AM, Nathan Wiger wrote:
> It doesn't seem that it's that hard to add a single line to your SETUP or
> BLESS or whatever method that calls SUPER::SETUP.
I'm pretty sure one of the big points about the system described is that it
ensures both that there's always a predictable and automatic chain of events
for SETUP/DESTROY (without requiring the programmer to create and document
his own bug-free implementation) and it ensures that each routine is called
only once, regardless of multiple inheritance paths.
And I still vote for BUILD, SETUP, or MAKE over BLESS. The whole notion of
blessing is non-obvious enough already. But bless() does the blessing.
Those chained routines do the INITing, or the BUILDing, or the SETUP. They
don't do the blessing. I think the conceptual hurdle for newbies will be
the order of dispatch, not the name of the routine that get called after
blessing. Naming it BLESS too greatly favors the first week of Perl use,
punishing experienced programmers by making them do all their setup and
initialization in routines with a fanciful and illogical name. After
several years of this, we'd see 50 Perl 7 RFCs about renaming BLESS to
BUILD, SETUP, or MAKE. Mark my words! ;)
Actually, I'd be happy with an RFC for an entirely new method of object
creation and identification that has nothing to do with bless (but I don't
expect one and I'm not clever enough to come up with something myself that'd
sway the Perl public...)
-John
