Nick Ing-Simmons <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Mark Sparshatt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> >>I'm not 100% certain about the details but I think this is how it works. >> >>In languages like C++ objects and classes are completely seperate. >>classes form an inheritance heirachy and objects are instances of a >>particular class. >> >>However in some languages (I think that Smalltalk was the first) there's >>the idea that everything is an object, including classes. So while an >>object is an instance of a class, that class is an instance of another >>class, which is called the metaclass. I don't there's anything special >>about these classes other than the fact that their instances are also >>classes. >> >> >>Thinking about it I think you may have the relationship between >>ParrotObject and ParrotClass the wrong way around. Since a class is an >>object but and object isn't a class it would be better for ParrotClass >>to inherit from ParrotObject, rather than the other way round. >> >>In Ruby when you create a class Foo, the Ruby interpreter automatically >>creates a class Foo' and sets the klass attribute of Foo to point to Foo'. >> >>This is important since class methods of Foo are actually instance >>methods of Foo'. Which means that method dispatch is the same whether >>you are calling an instance of class method. > > So in perl5-ese when you call > > Foo->method > > you are actually calling sub Foo::method which is in some sense > a "method" of the %Foo:: "stash" object. > > So what you suggest is as if perl5 compiled Foo->method > into (\%Foo::)->method and the %Foo:: 'stash' was blessed...
Personally, I've always wished that Perl5 *had* done that. I've toyed with the idea of blessing Stashes, but never got around to actually implementing anything.
