John Siracusa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Well, er, don't we need to decide what the subroutine attribute is, so that > the compiler will know to honor it and make the code "disappear"? It > doesn't seem like a feature that can be added from "userland" after the fact > (but maybe I'm wrong...)
In Perl 5 that could be done from userland, as you say, by using an optree manipulator (optimizer.pm for example). This could even be lexically scoped. [Once the compiler hints are fixed.] I expect Perl 6 to ship with (Parrot::* ?) modules that allow to examine and to modify the compiled form of the programs. Something that probably Java 6 will not have...
