I wasn't criticizing CGI but trying to analyze the conditions for a new HTML DSL module. :)

I'm sure compilation speed shouldn't matter when generating closures. (I will add a benchmark later this day)

But CGI was designed for Perl 4 and I suppose Perl 4 wasn't able to closure... IIRC it didn't even have lexical variables.

Your wibble-tag is implemented as a method call, so it wouldn't depend on exporting and pre declaration anyway.

But DSLs are at the very least just syntactic sugar to avoid method calls.

> Anyway it's all gone now, or soon will be

Thanks for your work! :)

> I'm sure compilation speed shouldn't matter when generating closures. (I will add a benchmark later this day)

Here a simplified example which showed that installing subs with closures¹ is 5 times faster than eval.

That's less dramatic than I thought, but eval performance also heavily depends on the length of code.

So adding 10 no-ops already made eval 10 times slower while closure didn't change.

use strict;
use warnings;
use Time::HiRes qw/time/;


BEGIN {
    $\="\n";
    my $count=1000;
    sub noop { };
    
    my $start=time;
    sub tag_gen {
        my ($tag)=@_;
        sub {
            noop("Ipse Lorum");
            noop("Ipse Lorum");
            noop("Ipse Lorum");
            noop("Ipse Lorum");
            noop("Ipse Lorum");
            noop("Ipse Lorum");
            noop("Ipse Lorum");
            noop("Ipse Lorum");
            noop("Ipse Lorum");
            noop("Ipse Lorum");
            "<$tag>",@_,"</$tag>";
        }
    }
    {
        no strict 'refs';
        for my $x (1..$count) {
            
            my $tag="h$x";
            *{$tag}=tag_gen($tag);
        }
    }
    print "Closure: ",time-$start;

    
    $start = time;
    for my $x (1..$count) {
        my $tag="H$x";
        eval sprintf <<'__CODE__', $tag;
        sub %1$s {
            noop("Ipse Lorum");
            noop("Ipse Lorum");
            noop("Ipse Lorum");
            noop("Ipse Lorum");
            noop("Ipse Lorum");
            noop("Ipse Lorum");
            noop("Ipse Lorum");
            noop("Ipse Lorum");
            noop("Ipse Lorum");
            noop("Ipse Lorum");

            "<%1$s>",@_,"</%1$s>";
        }
__CODE__
    }
    print "Eval: ",time-$start;
}





print h1 h2 "closure";

print H1 H2 "eval";
[download]

output:

Closure: 0.0279860496520996
Eval: 0.343567132949829
<h1><h2>closure</h2></h1>
<H1><H2>eval</H2></H1>
[download]

One has to keep in mind that 15-20 years ago machines were factor 1000 slower, i.e. auto loading was relevant.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)}

PS: Je suis Charlie!

update

fixed bug with no-ops.

¹) currying to be precise

I wasn't able to reproduce this without explicitly importing "wibble"

  DB<100> use CGI qw(:all wibble)

  DB<101> wibble
 => "<wibble />"
[download]

but

  DB<100> use CGI ':all'

  DB<101> $x=CGI->new()

  DB<102> $x->wibble()
Undefined subroutine CGI::wibble
 at (eval 24)[multi_perl5db.pl:644] line 2
[download]

So autoloading makes not much sense in this case.

It doesn't make the code more flexible it only delays the installation, which could already happen in the importer.

You had to use :any to get this behaviour:

$ pmvers CGI
3.59
$ perl -E 'use CGI qw/:any/; say CGI->new->wibble({foo=>"bar"},"baz")'
<wibble foo="bar">baz</wibble>
[download]

> You had to use :any to get this behaviour:

Didn't see this, because :any is not documented in CGI , though -any is as a "pragma" (and mentioned in your blog-post)

There is also a mention of -compile , which means AUTOLOAD isn't needed to create the HTML-DSL.

IOW you could¹ get rid of AUTOLOAD without deprecating HTML-subs, just by making -compile the default.

But if you meant to deprecate the -autoload pragma, this seems to be a good idea.

Installing an AUTOLOAD into the importing namespace sounds like a very hazardous hack.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)}

PS: Je suis Charlie!

¹) I don't say "should" :)

update

After reading your blog-post again (>4th time) I'm puzzled. You only say you are disabling AUTOLOAD but not that you are deprecating precompiled HTML-subs in general.

Did I misunderstand you? Maybe you could clarify.