On Sun, 2005-05-15 at 19:18 +0200, Juerd wrote: > Now: > Declaration Explicit Implicit $_ $?SELF > has $.var | $obj.var \ .var \ ./var \ > has $:var | $obj.:var \ .:var \ ./:var \ > > Consistent: > has $.var \ $obj.var \ .var \ ./var \ > has $.:var \ $obj.:var \ .:var \ ./:var \ > > See it yet? It's about consistency in the whole scheme, not the clarity > of a single element.
I'm not sure I see that you changed anything other than changing "Old way" to "Now", "Your proposal" to "Consistent", adding separator characters between the columns, and removing the word "Implicit" from the last column. I'm still not seeing the problem. Counting down and then right, I read those: "$." means attribute; "$:" means private attribute; "$x." means accessor method; "$x.:" means private accessor method; and so on... I think you're confusing the method glyph "." and the attribute glyph, also "." in the first and second columns. Consistency would be to make accessor methods use both the attribute and accessor glyphs "..", but that would cause at least 4 problems that I can think of, so "." is a nice simple thing to do. In the case of private accessor methods, most of those reasons go away, so ".:" needn't be (and in fact can't be) shortened. All of the details aside, I simply don't see newbies getting all that confused. For starters, there's no particular reason that they would have to use private attributes all that often, and if they did, they don't really EVER have to use accessor methods on them, though style might nudge them in that direction, there's no real impact on scalability the way there is with regular accessors (because every use of the private accessor is local to the class definition). Now, the one place I can see that you should ALWAYS use the private attribute accessors is in roles. Here, it would be essential, as you don't know what the composing class might want to do to that method, so the only place that I see this being a big concern is in roles that have private attributes. Certainly an edge case newbies won't contend with all that often, yes? > Note that it's not *implicit* $?SELF. "./" is a prefix operator that > calls a method on $?SELF That's picking nits. I know that, but was referring to the implicit use of $?SELF regardless of the syntax one would have to employ in order to use it explicitly.
