in reply to Re^3: How will you use state declared variables in Perl6?
in thread How will you use state declared variables in Perl6?

Yes. That is a good example of the possible surprise factor.

Now inherit Class Qux from Class Bar, and every time you call ->foo() from any instance of either class, state $bar will be incremented. This has the potential for an even bigger surprise factor I think.

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal?
"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
The "good enough" maybe good enough for the now, and perfection maybe unobtainable, but that should not preclude us from striving for perfection, when time, circumstance or desire allow.

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Re^5: How will you use state declared variables in Perl6?
by TimToady (Parson) on Jul 08, 2005 at 22:44 UTC
    Nah, it's only surprising if foo doesn't know it's a method. Methods should never be surprised by being inherited. And Perl 6 methods always know they're methods because they have their own keyword. If foo doesn't properly manage its own state, that foo's problem, not anyone else's.
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      Okay. How will a method know how to segregate the management of a state var under inheritance?

      Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.
      Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal?
      "Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".
      The "good enough" maybe good enough for the now, and perfection maybe unobtainable, but that should not preclude us from striving for perfection, when time, circumstance or desire allow.
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        Why should it have to "segregate", unless you have a busted inheritance hierarchy that doesn't actually represent ISA relationships?

        That being said, if you want to prevent the method itself from being called on behalf of an object of a derived class, just call it a submethod instead, and then the derived class will have to define its own version of the submethod that will presumably refer to its own class attributes. I suspect that in general most class attributes are of interest only to infrastructural methods like constructors and initializers and destructors, and most of those should be submethods in the first place.

        If a method ever has to ask what the actual type of its invocant it, it's usually a clue that something is seriously wrong in the design of either the program or the language. It's the dispatcher that should be making those kinds of decisions before your method is ever called. Perl 6 provides several degrees of freedom in the dispatcher to help you keep that sort of infrastructural spaghetti out of your methods.

        Of course, we won't prevent you from examining the actual type of the invocant if you really want to...

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