Garrett Goebel wrote: > worried about the loss of data-hiding with Perl6's lexicals. > Was that ever resolved?
Here in the 10-step Perl 6 program we don't talk about resolution. We just learn to cope with change. ;) There were two issues I had. As a Perl 6 user I felt uncomfortable that Perl 6 is encouraging people to violate lexical scoping. The other was that it seemed impossible to compile any code if a caller at run-time can yank the lexical carpet out from underneath a sub. Happily I've learned to cope with both. I think in serious code people won't do it -- there will probably be pragmas to disable run-time mucking with lexicals. Same thing for compilation. Some Perl 6 features just might not work when compiled to JVM or .Net or native code. (I think Java Python is proof that this isn't a huge problem in practice.) Re-defining constants is a simliar thing and I have similar reservations. It might make reading programs harder. It will definitely hurt compilation. The trouble will be that the compiler can't inline a constant. If it can't inline the constant, then it won't be able to do constant folding, dead code elimination and a whole bunch of other cool stuff. On the other hand, people live with C's preprocessor and its #undef/#define of constants. If C programmers don't mind having different parts of a program compiled with different values for the same constant, then why should Perl programmers? ;) - Ken
