[% setvar title No special UPPERCASE_NAME subroutines %]
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<a name='TITLE'></a><h1>TITLE</h1>
<p>No special UPPERCASE_NAME subroutines</p>
<a name='VERSION'></a><h1>VERSION</h1>
<pre>  Maintainer: Ilya Zakharevich &lt;<a href='mailto:ilya@math.ohio-state.edu'>ilya@math.ohio-state.edu</a>&gt;
  Date: 15 Sep 2000
  Mailing List: <a href='mailto:perl6-language@perl.org'>perl6-language@perl.org</a>
  Number: 243
  Version: 1
  Status: Developing</pre>
<a name='ABSTRACT'></a><h1>ABSTRACT</h1>
<p>This RFC proposes that no subroutines with uppercased names should be
special in Perl.</p>
<a name='DESCRIPTION'></a><h1>DESCRIPTION</h1>
<p>If some special action handler needs to be registered, this should be
done not by using a special name, but by a pragma.</p>
<pre>  use tie STORE =&gt; sub { ... };</pre>
<p>not</p>
<pre>  sub STORE { ... }</pre>
<p>This would make declarations of handlers visually distinctive,
would avoid prolifiration of hundreds of special names for handlers,
would avoid conflicts with interfaces to external libraries which define
a STORE() funcation etc.</p>
<a name='MIGRATION ISSUES'></a><h1>MIGRATION ISSUES</h1>
<p>Translate currently special names to the corresponding pragmas, as shown
above.  (BEGIN/END etc. are proposed to drop <code>sub</code> in RFC68, so they are not
covered by this RFC.)</p>
<a name='IMPLEMENTATION'></a><h1>IMPLEMENTATION</h1>
<p>This way to introduce the handlers is already used with overloading.  Keep
in mind that the overhead of calling an overloaded method is 4..5 times
lower than the overhead of calling the tie()d method (when the semantic
is the same, for example, when comparing a scalar FETCH with the overloaded
<code>'~'</code>.)</p>
<p>Currently overloaded methods live in the symbol table, but are converted to
not-completely-alphanumeric names.  A similar way may be used for other
handlers introduced by pragmas, so they may continue to be inheritable if
needed.  For example, the above subroutine for STORE may live under the name
<code>'tie/STORE'</code>.</p>
<a name='REFERENCES'></a><h1>REFERENCES</h1>
<p>RFC 68 (v2): Eliminate the optional <code>sub</code> for <code>BEGIN</code> etc block declarations</p>
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