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

On Wed, Aug 30, 2000 at 03:17:59PM -0400, Michael G Schwern wrote:
> Its not just objects and classes we're talking about, its types and
> variables, too.  Remember, Perl ain't all OO yet.  Which is further
> aggrivated if "my Class $obj" has magical meaning and calls a
> constructor.
> 
> Now, we could define a set of builtin, reserved types which cannot be
> used as classnames and which Perl treats specially.  Instead of
> calling the constructor, they would do some efficiency voodoo behind
> the scenes based on their given type.
> 
> This seems perfectly feasible, I'm just worried about having a double
> meaning and special behaviors for "my Dog $spot" this early in the game.
I don't see why this needs to be... either:
1) We clearly define in the beginning that if "Dog" is a basic type, then
this has semi-magical properties.
2) We clearly define that basic types will always m/^[A-Z]+$/.

This makes it such that we have to say my INT $n, but that's quite
consistant with the rest of perl.  (It also makes it so that all-uppercase
module names without any colons might behave oddly.  This is bad for CGI,
but if it becomes WWW::CGI, then it's all OK...)

	-=- James Mastros