Re: RFC 171 (v1) my Dog $spot should call a constructor implicitly

On Tue, Aug 29, 2000 at 11:04:26PM -0400, Michael Maraist wrote:
> First greatly stylistic compatibilty.  An inexperienced programmer would
> see:
> my Dog $spot = "Spot";
> 
> And become confused.  It's totally unintuitive (at least so far as other
> mainstream OO languages go).  It looks like Dog could be a type of String
> subclass.

Why would the programmer become confused?  In C++ (a mainstream OO
language), if a Dog constructor was defined that took a string as an
argument, the string would be auto-converted to a Dog.

So, if this were adopted for Perl, the programmer would know that the
class constructor for Dog would be called to instantiate $spot, then,
because of the assignment, the Dog->STORE() method would be called.
And if the programmer were inexperienced, it would be a perfect time
for them to learn something.

-Scott
-- 
Jonathan Scott Duff
[email protected]