On Sunday, December 14, 2003, at 06:14 PM, Larry Wall wrote:
But the agreement could be implied by silence. If, by the time the entire program is parsed, nobody has said they want to extend an interface, then the interface can be considered closed. In other words, if you think you *might* want to extend an interface at run time, you'd better say so at compile time somehow. I think that's about as far as we can push it in the "final" direction.
That seems a very fair rule, especially if it adds a smidge more speed. Runtime extension will likely be very unusual -- requiring it to be explicit seems reasonable.
I'm probably spouting nonsense. I just hope it's good-sounding nonsense...
It's beyond good-sounding, it's frickin' awesome.
MikeL
