While I completely agree with Tanktalus previous (rather long) post, I don't think the concept of interface is completely useless in the Perl world.

I think it'd be nice if there were some kind of "soft" or "advisory" interfaces. They wouldn't force anything, they'd be just a standard way of querying if the module implements a well defined set of functions.

An appropriate name for this would be UNIVERSAL::implements, so you'd be able to query classes for some specific behaviour like: 
if (Class->implements('interface')) {
  # do stuff
}

[download]
Then you'd have a way of each class to specify which interfaces they implement and a simple way of defining these interfaces. It would be just a well specified way of programming by contract.

I think this sounds like a reasonable idea, but might just be overkill. I don't really know.

I just wanted to note that I think this is one of the true beauties of Perl: in other languages this discussion probably wouldn't even exist since it'd be something impossible to do.

Update: typo fixed.


acid06
perl -e "print pack('h*', 16369646), scalar reverse $="

In reply to Re: Interfaces for the masses! by acid06
in thread Interfaces for the masses! by rvosa

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