Ideas for a talk

[Marvin Humphrey]

On Sep 10, 2006, at 1:41 PM, Bruce James wrote:

> Marvin:
>
> What about the fieldhashes?

I haven't used them, yet.  However, I have written my own inside-out  
classes, and I've run into the problems that fieldhashes are supposed  
to help out on.  It'd be nice not to have to pay so much attention to  
writing DESTROY methods, or to how keys get stringified.  I love the  
convenience of being able to subclass anything using the inside-out  
technique -- bless hash, blessed C struct, blessed filehandle -- and  
attach my own attributes without worrying about, say, namespace  
collision inside a hash object.  Fieldhashes make that common use  
case more convenient.

Threading is improved but still complex, and the serialization  
problem (how to get Data::Dumper, Storable, etc to see your  
attributes) remains unsolved.  But those are problems only faced in a  
small subset of the situations when you'd want an inside-out object.   
The destruction and stringification problems that fieldhashes address  
are ones you have to solve every time.

Marvin Humphrey
Rectangular Research
http://www.rectangular.com/