On 1/20/06, Larry Wall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[snip really cool blathering]
I don't have much to say on the deeper question, but I have a few
ideas on the P5 -> P6 translation question, especially as it relates
to OO:
1) Don't translate at all. Ponie, delegating to Parrot, is
supposed to handle all of that OO garbage in the same way that Ruby
and Python are going to interact with Perl6. Perl5 and Perl6 are as
similar as Ruby and Python, so you might as well write a translator
between them as one between Perl5 and Perl6.
Pros: Larry doesn't have to do anything more on the WMoT.
Cons: The community, for some reason, really wants this
auto-translator, even though there wasn't one for P4->P5 and P5->P6 is
a greater leap than P4->P5 was.
2) Don't attempt to translate $x->{whatever} (or $x->[2] or
$x->('whatever') ... ) in isolation. If it occurs within a function
defined in a package that has a function that uses bless and it's the
first parameter, it's an attribute access. Otherwise, it's a hash
access.
Pros: It's a nice and easy rule which will work if the programmer
didn't violate encapsulation, only puts methods in classes, and is
generally an all-around nice guy.
Cons: See Pros.
3) Since about half of all classes in P5-land use some module in
Class::* to auto-generate stuff (thus providing a nice place to find
all the attribute names), ask the community to provide a translator
for each of those. Then, use #2 for the others.
Pros: The WMoT can punt in about half the cases.
Cons: The WMoT cannot punt in about half the cases.
Rob
