Stevan Little

I spent much of the last few days working on some syntactic improvements to the p5-mop. I had originally went with a fairly straightforward method for specifying things like inheritance, role composition, etc. It basically looks like this:

class Foo (extends => 'Bar', with => ['Baz', 'Gorch']) {}

This works well because it is basically just using a simple Perl list to pass in information to the underlying meta-objects. My only issue with this is that everything is a string, which is no different then what we have now using base or @ISA, but I wanted to see if I could improve this a little.

After wrestling with Devel::Declare for a while (yes, I know it is evil, but it is just for the prototype, the real version will not use it), I was able to get the following syntax to work.

class Foo extends Bar with Baz, Gorch {}

I like this because in general I feel it is cleaner and as a bonus saves a bunch of typing of quotes and other symbols (read: reduces "line noise"). The best part about this is that it really just desugars down to the old form, meaning I didn't have to add any complexity to the MOP, only to the syntax parser.

Currently this code resides in a branch as I want to do some more parser stress tests before I put it into master, but so far it is working quite well.