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james (1129)

james
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Journal of james (1129)

Tuesday June 10, 2003
05:38 AM

Magic References

[ #12725 ]

I've been playing around with Perl over the last couple of days to see what I can do with references. I really get annoyed with having to test everything to see if it is blessed before testing to see if it matches the interface that I'm expecting:

    if (blessed( $arg ) && $arg->isa('Some::Class')) {
        # ...
    }

So what I've been trying to do is get it so that references are automagically blessed into a class that shares the name of their reference type:

    % perl -Mmagicrefs -MData::Dumper -e 'print Dumper( {} )'
    $VAR1 = bless( {}, 'HASH' );

And it all works, so now I can do:

    use lib './lib';
    use strict;
    use magicrefs; ## turn on magic references

    my $c = {
              Auto => 'blessed',
              refs => 'are',
              fun => '.'
            };

    print $c->keys->join(','),"\n";

    ## or ##

    if ($c->keys->grep( sub { /^[A-Z]/ } )->size == 1) {
        print "right\n";
    } else {
        print "wrong\n";
    }

    ## or ##

    my %hash = $c->deref;

    ## or with the magic of deparse

    print sub { 1; }->code(), "\n";

I'm guessing the chances of this going into the core are pretty slim however :-)


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  • The "blessed( $arg ) && $arg->isa('Some::Class')" idiom is not necessary. You can do

    #!perl -l
    $x = {};
    print UNIVERSAL::isa($x,"Foo::Bar") ? 1 : 0;
    print UNIVERSAL::isa($x,"HASH") ? 1 : 0;
    __END__
    0
    1

    (as documented in the UNIVERSAL manpage)
    • I know, I was using it as a small, trite example. The actual problem is that its easier to refactor away conditions if everything is an object - which is my real dislike. I felt going into why I like to refactor away conditions was probably beyond the scope of the journal entry, which was more about having HASH/ARRAY/SCALAR/... objects, and the nice things that you can do once you have them.
      • And by the way are you going to upload magicrefs to some comprehensive perl archive network ?
        • It's essentially a patch against pp.c in the perl source. I could put it on CPAN, but it seems like a strange place to put a patch. I think it might be possible to do something similar with optimizer.pm, but I need to talk to sky a little about that.
          • Ah. You're evil, then ;-) If this is a core patch, then I don't understand what's in magicrefs.pm -- is it a lexical pragma ? What core function(s) are you patching, and to do what ?
            • magicrefs.pm is a pragma similar to sort, ie, not lexical.

              Essentially it alters S_refto in pp.c. magicrefs.pm sets a hint that is examined in S_refto to determine whether or not we should bless all references that are created (with the exception of those that are SvREADONLY). magicrefs also use's the various reftype modules.

  • Newfangled (Score:3, Informative)

    by acme (189) on 2003.06.10 7:36 (#20964) Homepage Journal
    Now all you need to do is make sure that it works with Acme::Dot and then we have Ruby in Perl!

  • Possible breakage (Score:4, Informative)

    by 2shortplanks (968) on 2003.06.10 8:42 (#20969) Homepage Journal
    Quite a lot of code needs to know if what it's passed is a object (which it shouldn't go inside) or a hash (which it can.) To do this it uses blessed which you've just broken.

    Let's fix that

    sub BasicType::a_sub_not_likely_to_be_here { 0 }
    @HASH::ISA=qw(BasicType);
    @ARRAY::ISA=qw(BasicType);
    ...
    (untested code, of course)
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