At 11:32 AM 8/23/00 -0700, Larry Wall wrote:
>Tom Christiansen writes:
>: >2) The ability to dump out a variable and all its attached state into
>: >something that can be loaded in later somewhere else.
>:
>: To hope to do this completely and correctly is courageous.
>:
>: my @funx = ();
>: for my $name (qw/violet purple cream/) {
>: push @funx, sub {
>: print "I'll take a $name one, please, with @_.\n";
>: };
>: }
>:
>: dump \@funx;
>:
>: Closures will be challenging. :-)
>
>Well, scratch it hard enough and you'll see that we're just discussing
>persistent continuations.
Yup. And, since the bytecode's going to have to have ways to list
variables, variable initializations, and lexical scope creation anyway,
it's not that big a deal. Dumping closures is actually relatively easy,
since they're mostly self-contained. (Assuming, of course, you ignore the
whole package variable and package subroutines thing... :)
AUTOLOAD for methods and symbolic refs are by far a bigger issue for a
comprehensive "Dump just what this object needs" thing.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
