Not that Perl would be lacking string manipulation facilities, but this new feature proposal for (allegedly) perl5.10 simply cries for rubyisms::String:
use autobox SCALAR => 'rubyisms::String';
print " bla "->strip;
my $foo = "bAR";
$foo->capitalizeI;
print $foo;
Due to different lexer rules in Ruby I had to find a different nomenclature for string.strip! so I chose $string->stripI with 'I' being mnemonic for 'in-place' while maintaining some visual similarity to '!'.
So far done are capitalize, capitalizeI, strip, stripI and center. This will take another couple of days since it's being done in XS. After that I can finally run some benchmarks and see whether the XS approach makes up for some of the performance hits introduced by autobox (which I haven't yet benchmarked, either, so they might not even be severe at all).
For those being adventurous enough (and curious about how it feels like to have everything act like an object), grab perl5.8.1-RC4 and autobox from the CPAN, apply the patch, compile and have FUNNNNNN!
Rather than using method vs methodI, I chose to use context to determine whether or not the receiver was modified, which seemed more Perlish.
Re:See CPAN
ethan on 2003-08-09T15:43:16
My first intention was to really duplicate Ruby's interface. On second thought, this might not be a good idea. One reason for that is that I am not yet sure whether autobox.pm is powerful enough. Also, I don't know what happens when you do astring.strip!.capitalize!in Ruby (that is, willstringbe capitalized and stripped in-place? If so, can this be done with autobox at all?)
The main problem here is to determine whether something feels Perlish or not: Perl so far had no primitive objects and subsequently there is no experience with it. So far I can say that this new interface feels kind of odd with Perl...but not unpleasant.
Re:Scalar::Properties does some of that
ethan on 2003-08-10T05:48:51
No, actually I hadn't seen it. It seems to result in the same interface. Two differences though: One is the implementation. You use constant overloading and thus turn things into real objects.autoboxon the other hand wont ever bless something. It invokes the method directly on the primitives (and thus wont suffer from the slowdown caused by blessed referents). Btw, it is lexically scoped, so it can be turned on and off selectively for blocks.
Secondly,Scalar::Propertiescomes with its own methods whereaus in case ofautoboxyou add them to the classes SCALAR, HASH and ARRAY yourself. This is both more extensible and easier to use from XS since the extension subroutines simply receive an ordinary (non-blessed)SV*as first argument.
The disadvantage ofautoboxon the other hand is that you need to patch perl itself, at least until it finds its way into perl5.10 (which isn't yet clear at all).
Re:Module name
ethan on 2003-08-10T07:32:36
You are right, good suggestion. I don't likerubyisms::Stringvery much either...I chose it because of Simon Cozen'srubyismsmodule.
Hmmh, is there a rule that lexically scoped module usage has to relate to pragmata? I just implemented the import() and unimport() semantics that allow
use String::Ruby;
print "foo"->center(10);
{
no String::Ruby;
print "foo"->center(10); # fatal error
}
I guess there's nothing wrong with that even though the module is still rather pragmatic.
