I'd really like to make blessing into things like '', '0', 'HASH', and "\0" illegal just to put some things to rest.

I'll agree with you with regard to everything but 'HASH' and other type specific designations. Since ref was so ill-conceived from the beginning there will always be code out there that gets nailed by bad coding decisions. Being able to bless a reference so that it appears to crude analysis to be of a different type than than it really is can be a useful workaround. It can be used to deal with bad coding such as ref $obj eq 'HASH' when you want to pass in a blessed hash, or a couple of other tricks like things with overriden deref operators.

Truth be told however, I would almost argue that blessed and reftype should be added to the perl core (without requiring Scalar::Utils) and ref deprecated. I would also make reftype take an optional second argument turning it into a type specific ISA.

I agree that its a real pitty that ref is so poorly thought out. But theres not much to be done about it now.


---
demerphq

    First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
    -- Gandhi

In reply to Re: Re^4: Recursive map Design Questions by demerphq
in thread Recursive map Design Questions by bsb

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.