All,
Speaking briefly, I would like it if Perl 6 provided a way for a
class (or role, or meta-class, etc) to declare that all variables
declared to be of that type are automatically/implicitly set to a
particular value at declaration time, so that they are not undefined
if the programmer using them doesn't explicitly set a value.
Here are usage examples:
my NumType $foo; # implicitly contains a defined NumType of value 0
my StrType $bar; # implicitly contains a defined StrType of value ''
Sure, the user could say ".= new()" or such, but I wanted a fallback
if they didn't do that.
Then when they come to just use that not explicitly set variable, it
contains some type-defined reasonable default value.
Presumably, the object meta-model would have an appropriate function
defined for use at that time, which returns undef by default, and
this function is what individual classes can override.
Part way through writing this, I had a brief chat on #perl6 with
stevan (and apparently the meta-model is still quite in flux) and he
said my question was related to Larry's "class but undef" idea, and
that Larry should talk more about the subject.
Thank you. -- Darren Duncan
