Stevan Little wrote:
> Jonathan Lang wrote:
> > OK. To help me get a better idea about what's going on here, what
> > sorts of attributes and methods would ^Dog have?
>
> Well, a metaclass describes the behaviors and attributes of a class,
> and ^Dog is an *instance* of the metaclass. So actually ^Dog would not
> actually have attributes and methods since it is an instance.
Huh? A dog can bark; so the Dog class should have a method called
'bark'. Or does 'can' not mean what it seems to mean?
> That said, I think ^Dog would probably respond to methods like
> these (some of which are described in S12):
OK; apparently, what I meant when I asked "what methods and attributes
does ^Dog have?" is what you're talking about when you speak of which
methods ^Dog will respond to. To me, an object has whatever methods
that it responds to.
> ^Dog.name # Dog
> ^Dog.version # 0.0.1 (or something similiar of course)
> ^Dog.authority # cpan:LWALL or email:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> ^Dog.identifier # returns the string Dog-0.0.1-cpan:LWALL
Would it be valid to speak of ^$spot? If so, what would ^$spot.name be?
> I would like to see some methods like this:
>
> # dynamically add a method that
> # Dog and $spot would respond to
> ^Dog.add_method(bark => method () { ... });
>
> Which would be like doing this in Perl 5:
>
> no strict 'refs';
> *{'Dog::bark'} = sub { ... };
IIRC, you can always create a new method for a class, even outside of
its definition, simply by ensuring that the first parameter to be
passed in will be an object of that type:
method bark (Dog $_) { ... }
or maybe
method Dog.bark () { ... }
> And of course if you can add a method, you will need to be able to
> fetch and delete them as well, so a &get_method and &remove_method
> would be in order as well.
To fetch a method, why not have .can() return a reference to the
method upon success? I might even go so far as to treat can() as an
lvalue, using the assignment of a coderef as an alternate way of
adding or changing the object's behavior on the fly:
method bark (Dog $_:) { ... };
Dog.can("bark") = method () { ... }; # Teach the dog a new trick
Dog.can("bark") = true; # inform the dog that it ought to know how
to bark, without telling it how, yet; equivalent to a literal "=
method { ... }".
Dog.can("bark") = false; # tell the dog to forget how to bark.
Dog.can("bark") = undef; # Ditto.
(Doing this to Dog DWIMs to modifying the behavior of all dogs at once
- you're declaring that "dogs can bark" or "this is how dogs bark",
whereas doing it to $spot DWIMs to modifying the behavior of $spot
only: "$brutus.can('bark') = false": my best friend's pet dog seems to
have lost the capacity to bark in its old age; that doesn't mean that
dogs in general can't bark.)
Similar things might be done with .has (for attributes), .isa (for
superclasses), and .does (for roles).
--
Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang
