I have uploaded asynchronous::universal::ready and asynchronous::universal::set_callback to CPAN. They are both entirely trivial packages with a mess of documentation. The idea behind them is to support asynchonous frameworks in which the immediate result of passing away a message is a placeholder object with a ready method that will return a false value until its result message comes back, at which time the placeholder upgrades itself to a result.
To avoid mandating true ready methods for all objects in the cosmos that might get returned as the result of an asynchronous function, asynchronous::universal::ready provides a true ready method in UNIVERSAL. set_callback presumes two interfaces to an asynchronous framework, "set_callback" for declaring a coderef that is supposed to be run when the asynchronous function completes. Synchronous objects have already completed, so UNIVERSAL::set_callback runs the coderef immediately. The other interface is a method "callback_queue" which would give direct, framework-dependent access to the callback queue on an object, should such a thing exist in the given asynchronous framework. UNIVERSAL::callback_queue returns an empty arrayref. The hubristic hope is that authors of asynchronous frameworks will standardize on these interfaces: ready, set_callback, callback_queue. Thanks for listening, and I'll take my answer off the air. :-) -- David L Nicol Aesop's fables, with text-sensitive advertising: http://cronos.advenge.com/pc/aesop/start.html
