It seems to me that Parrot should expose a "feature
testing" API. Something on the order of
int [read: boolean] par_has_feature(PAR_STRING *feature);
(yes, I _do_ think that claiming STRING is unnecessary
namespace pollution - sepecially as ANSI compilers, AFAIK,
aren't required to be case-sensitive)
This would be very useful for any language running on
Parrot, so that they can just test (via some language
binding) its presence at the beginning of a program, rather
than bombind out in the middle when they hit an
unimplemented call.
Example features might be async I/O, run-time compilation
(eval) of different languages, dynamic loading, etc.
Basically, I would like to be able to say:
use features qw[asyncio eval(perl6)];
and know that if my program loads, it's not going to panic
when it gets to an
eval 'Async::queueio_out($out_fh, $text);';
What d'y'all think?
-- BKS
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