TITLE

Make subroutines' prototypes accessible from Perl

VERSION

  Maintainer: Simon Cozens <simon@brecon.co.uk>
  Date: 25 Sep 2000
  Mailing List: perl6-language-subs@perl.org
  Number: 298
  Version: 1
  Status: Developing

ABSTRACT

Allow sub prototypes to be got and set by Perl at compile time.

DESCRIPTION

The motivation behind this RFC is to allow subroutine attributes to define canned "prototype classes". As a very trivial example:

    use attributes::prototype 'a_and_b' => "($a,$b)"

    sub foo : a_and_b { 
        # $a and $b are here set to what we knew as $_[0] and $_[1]
    }

Now, yes, I am suggesting that there be a attributes::prototype pragma, but that's not the thrust of my RFC - the point is how you implement it, and you have to do this by making the prototype available.

That's the motivation; the justification is slightly different, and it's to increase the flexibility and the possibilities for introspection that Perl 6's subroutines provide the user. More flexibility is always a good thing.

IMPLEMENTATION

There are a number of ways that this can be done; I'd originally thought that there should be Yet Another Special Variable, but it seems more Perlish to change prototype to be a function which returns the prototype of a built-in (same as Perl 5) or, when passed a fully qualified sub name, an lvaluable subroutine to get or set the prototype of that sub.

So attributes::prototype can then be implemented something vaguely like this: store "prototype class" declarations in a hash, say, %PROTOS; register the new attributes; when the attribute is processed, set prototype($sub) = $PROTOS{$attr}.

REFERENCES