Just to bring some of the IRC discussion to the list...
Carl Mäsak wrote:
> Rakudo and I have a disagreement over this: I expect to be able to
> assign to a $.foo attribute in methods within the class, whereas
> Rakudo demands the "is rw" attribute in order to do that.
>
> We discussed it a bit on #perl6 today.
>
> <http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2008-09-17#i_572836>
>
> I only have pragmatic arguments to offer for my point of view:
> somehow, it feels like each and every attribute gets an "is rw" as
> things stand now. The modifier somewhat loses its meaning... if it
> meant "_publicly_ readable/writable", it would only be used for some
> variables.
There's also the point that you can initialize attributes with the . twigil:
class Stuff { has $.more_stuff = 3 }
So at least visually it appears as though you *can* assign to it. Not
allowing that in other places feels weird.
Yes, I know that $.stuff actually translates to $( self.stuff ), so
without 'is rw' there is no rw accessor generated - but couldn't we just
fake assignment to '$.foo' to actually affect '$!foo'?
> Finally, some useless statistics: I count 12 attributes in different
> classes in November right now. Out of those, 12 (100%) have the "is
> rw" attribute.
This is mostly probably due to non-working constructors. Simple cases
seem to work, though:
12:29 < moritz_> rakudo: class A { has $.b }; my A $x .= new(b => 3);
say $x.b
12:29 < p6eval> rakudo 31204: OUTPUT[3]
Moritz
--
Moritz Lenz
http://moritz.faui2k3.org/ | http://perl-6.de/
