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use strict 'objects': a new pragma for using Java-like objects in Perl
Mantainer: Marco Marongiu <bronto@crs4.it> Date: 28 Sep 2000 Mailing List: perl6-language-objects@perl.org Number: 336 Version: 1 Status: Developing Co-mantainer: Stefano Sanna <gerda@crs4.it>
As noted in many other RFCs, many people in the Perl community are asking for a better implementation of objects in Perl. D.Conway in his RFC 188 gave us a good design for implementing private objects and attributes in Perl. Our humble effort is to go one step forward, slightly changing the RFC 188 requests and proposing two more unary operators: protected and static.
This RFC comes out from a discussion between the authors: a Perl programmer and a Java programmer. It came out that the sleeping hours we lost were worth an RFC, where together we proposed a modification of objects implementation in Perl.
We choose to ask for a pragma, since we didn't like the idea of Perl programmers forced to use the new operators that we are to propose. As people is not forced to predeclare subroutines, variables and so on, people will not be forced to declare an attribute as private or a method as static. Perlers' laziness must be preserved!
We propose to define a new schema to the strict pragma: use
strict 'objects'. Use-ing strict objects imports in the calling
package (or in all packages if declared inside main) three unary
operators: private, protected and static, that behave as
stated below.
Just take Conway's RFC 188 and do a s/private/protected/g :-)
Like Conway's private operator defined in RFC 188, but accessing an hash key or a method that has been marked as private from outside the defining package should result in a fatal error.
use strict 'objects' ;
package Base;
sub new {
my ($class, @data) = @_;
bless private { data => [@data] }, $class;
}
package SortableBase;
use base 'Base';
sub sorted {
my ($self) = @_;
print sort @{ $self->{Base::data} }; # should die now!
}
In our humble opinion, static doesn't make sense for attributes... erm... hashes or hash slices in perl. Anyway, we think it still makes sense to have static methods.
Static methods should be considered as public methods (unless otherwise specified via the private or protected operator) that can be invoked on bare classes directly, without needing an object instance. Methods not marked as such should return a fatal error if called directly on the class. For example:
package NoStatic ;
sub new { bless { foo => 'bar' } }
sub wen { print "Windows' evil nature" }
package Static ;
use strict 'objects' ;
static sub new { bless { foo => 'bar' } }
sub wen { print "Windows' evil nature" }
package main ;
my $nsobj = NoStatic->new() ; # ok
$nsobj->wen() ; # ok
NoStatic->wen() ; # ok
my $stobj = Static->new() ; # ok
$stobj->wen() ; # ok
Static->wen() ; # dies (not declared as static)
Subclasses should be allowed to overload a static method only with a prototyped one. Other attempts to redefine a static method should result in a fatal error.
A static method can also be declared as protected or private, prefixing with the desired operator:
use strict 'objects' ;
package MyClass ;
private static sub _do_cleanup {
# do something
}
sub cleaner {
# do something
MyClass->_do_cleanup ;
# do something more
}
Static methods would be needed when we want to have access to an object oriented interface to functions. For example, it would be nice if you could do something like:
use strict 'objects' ;
use POSIX @import_something ;
my $obj = new MyClass @params ;
# do something really-OO-style here
# and you can stand OO here, too
print POSIX->floor(3.1415926) ;
instead of
use POSIX @import_something ;
my $obj = new MyClass @params ;
# do something really-OO-style here, then
print floor(3.1415926) ;
# Not so OO, indeed
but this is just syntactic sugar :-)
Our english is not very good. In case of errors we apologize.
RFC 188: Objects : Private keys and methods