On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 02:49:10PM -0500, John M. Dlugosz wrote: > Wow. The overarching logic for list assignment would have to compare > the containers and the arguments in the capture before doing the list > assignment to each container, in order to avoid cloning all the > containers on the right first in the general case. It can't just copy > values out because they may contain iterators or be lazy or be infinite.
Well, that's not really a problem, as long as the same semantics are preserved. All you need to do is cut loose the contents of the container completely to the mercy of GC, build a new one with the appropriate structure, then copy values in from the assignment's RHS. The only reason Perl 5 couldn't do it this way is that the idiot who wrote it prematurely optimized values on the stack so that they didn't need to be reference counted. :) Larry
