Anyone relying on objects stringifying to class names?

[Jonathan Worthington]

Hi,

At the moment, if you have some ParrotObject instance, say foo, and do
something like:

$S0 = foo

Then $S0 will contain the name of the class. This is BAD because it
means you can't overload what a class stringifies too! In fact, there is
a comment in the code saying that:

/*

=item C<STRING *name()>

Shortcut for .class().name()

XXX - this is bad and should go

=cut

*/

So, I want to get rid of this and allow this v-table method to just
dispatch to a user implementation or a fallback. But before I do that, I
wanted to check if anyone is relying on the behavior? I'd really rather
not break working code without giving folks a chance to fix it, but this
behavior needs to die. I'm amazed, nobody has killed it already.

I propose this is removed in a week, please respond if you'd have an
issue with that or think that's too short.

Thanks,

Jonathan

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sat, Oct 28, 2006 at 06:50:05PM +0100, Jonathan Worthington wrote:
> So, I want to get rid of this and allow this v-table method to just
> dispatch to a user implementation or a fallback. But before I do that, I
> wanted to check if anyone is relying on the behavior? I'd really rather
> not break working code without giving folks a chance to fix it, but this
> behavior needs to die. I'm amazed, nobody has killed it already.
>
> I propose this is removed in a week, please respond if you'd have an
> issue with that or think that's too short.

I think it's too long. :-)

Does anything fail if you eliminate it (e.g., via "make tests")?
If no, then I think it's okay to eliminate, and we'll see
if anyone carps about it. But that's just my $0.02.

Pm

[Allison Randal]

Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
>>
>> I propose this is removed in a week, please respond if you'd have an
>> issue with that or think that's too short.
>
> I think it's too long. :-)
>
> Does anything fail if you eliminate it (e.g., via "make tests")?
> If no, then I think it's okay to eliminate, and we'll see
> if anyone carps about it. But that's just my $0.02.

A week's notice seems fair. Then if all the tests pass, nuke it! :)

Allison

[Jonathan Worthington]

Jonathan Worthington wrote:
> At the moment, if you have some ParrotObject instance, say foo, and do
> something like:
>
> $S0 = foo
>
> Then $S0 will contain the name of the class.
>

> ...
>
> =item C<STRING *name()>
>
Erm, what the heck was I smoking when I wrote this...the name method
doesn't control what an object stringifies to at all. I managed to read
it as get_string. :-(

Sorry 'bout that. And while this is marked as being bad in the comment,
I can't remove it since it's used (and I'm not even sure, how bad it is
now). PGE uses it for example.

D'oh.

Jonathan

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sat, Nov 04, 2006 at 08:46:37PM +0000, Jonathan Worthington wrote:
> Jonathan Worthington wrote:
> >At the moment, if you have some ParrotObject instance, say foo, and do
> >something like:
> >
> > $S0 = foo
> >
> >Then $S0 will contain the name of the class.
> >

> >=item C<STRING *name()>
>
> Erm, what the heck was I smoking when I wrote this...the name method
> doesn't control what an object stringifies to at all. I managed to read
> it as get_string. :-(
>
> Sorry 'bout that. And while this is marked as being bad in the comment,
> I can't remove it since it's used (and I'm not even sure, how bad it is
> now). PGE uses it for example.

Hmm, I can't recall where PGE might be using this -- could you
point to an example so I can make sure it's relatively sane?

Thanks,

Pm