xenoterracide: perl syntax wishlist

Showing posts with label perl syntax wishlist. Show all posts

Jun 11, 2012

Perl Core Syntax Wishlist: Role Support

I want to see Role's added, even PHP got Traits before Perl. It doesn't have to be a huge thing, in fact all I want is the composition aspect. Let me do this: I don't really want or need anything else right now, just that would be fine. We should have interfaces too, but they aren't really required just to support Role's. We should probably have some sugar like I did for class (e.g. role keyword. and some of the same modules/pragmas loaded for this too)

May 28, 2012

Perl Core Syntax Wishlist: Class support

I would like to see the class keyword become part of Perl, but unlike some I don't want it simply because it's nicer syntax. I'd like it to behave differently from package. I'd basically like to see this

class MyClass { method foo { return $self->{foo} } method info { return load_class('Class::Info')->new } } { use strict; use warnings; use utf8; # so our class can be named with utf8 package MyClass { use namespace::autoclean; use Scalar::Util qw( blessed ); # use Class::Load qw( load_class ); # or similar for a feature that I'm hoping will be in Class::Load in the future # for now I'll show with require sub new { # or something better, point is that there's a default simple constructor my $class = shift; my $self = ref $_[0] eq 'HASH' ? $_[0] : { @_ }; bless $self, $class; return $self; } sub foo { my $self = shift; return $self->{foo} } sub info { #doesn't actually do what I'm really suggesting my $self = shift; require Class::Info; return Class::Info->new; } } } MyClass->new->foo;

I'm sure smarter people than I could think of a few more things that might be nice to have by default in all classes. I would like to note that method signatures is not that big of a deal to me, unless of course you want to give me named variables in the signature besides just auto shifting off self, e.g. method foo ( $bar ) { return $self->{foo} if $bar }

May 14, 2012

Perl Core Syntax Wishlist: die should die

I hate die it is, in my humble opinion, one of the worst parts of perl. I really wish it would be deprecated, and removed, or at least replaced with something that would tell you were the code that was die-ing was being called. Replace its implementation with that of Carp's croak or confess and I'd be happy. Better yet, let's just get real exception support and deprecate die (even if that's never removed deprecation just make that real big on its pod). If you're using die please stop and use Carp, anyone using your module will thank (and by thank I mean not curse) you later.

May 7, 2012

Perl Core Syntax Wishlist: an Exception Stack

I have come to wish many things were part of Perl syntax that are not, and no using external modules is not enough for me. I think it's time Perl got the features as part of the language itself (and yes I suppose I could settle for feature.pm, and no I'm probably not going to write them myself, I'm not smart enough yet). The first of these is a proper exception stack. I want to be able to write:

use 5.018; use warnings; sub foo { throw Exception->new( 'message' ); } try { foo(); } catch ( 'Exception' ) { say "$_"; # object stringifies } catch ( 'Exception::Other' ) { say $_->message #also has an accessor } finally { ... }

I think we need throw, try, catch, and finally keywords. And no I don't think it makes sense to have Object->throw. In fact I think this Original Perl 6 Syntax Proposal reads like just what we need in Perl 5. Unfortunately I think this is what we are getting in Perl 6, which IMO is not as nice.

xenoterracide