[Pdx-pm] Musings on operator overloading (was: File-Fu overloading)

[Aristotle Pagaltzis]

Hi Aaron,

* Aaron Crane <perl at aaroncrane.co.uk> [2008-02-24 17:30]:
> Aristotle Pagaltzis writes:
> > My counterproposal, were it possible in Perl 5, which it
> > isn’t, would be something like this:
> > 
> >     my $dir = 'foo'; # no object at all!
> > 
> >     foreach my $fn (qw(bar baz bat)) {
> >       my $file = path { $dir / $fn };
> >       open my $fh, '<', $file or die "$!\n";
> >       while(my $line = <$fh>) {
> >         # ...
> >       }
> >     }
> 
> With only a little fiddling, that does seem at least mostly
> possible to me.

Not really, I’m afraid – not with your approach either. The
problem is two-fold:

1. It’s temporally scoped, not lexically.
2. “No object at all” can’t be done in *reasonable* fashion.

In other words, it’s faintly similar, but due to the limited
semantics of Perl 5 it loses so much of its appeal that it’s
hardly worth the effort.

:-/

Neat hack, though. The solution may ultimately fall short, but
even the limited Perl 5 semantics can carry one surprisingly far
with some outside-the-box thinking. Nice.

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>