Re: Perl 6 property mini-tutorial

[John M. Dlugosz]

Thanks for the additional information.

I suppose the "property methods" basically is a function that is given the thing to which it is applying, and it can monkey with it any way it wants.

—John

[TheDamian]

Yes, exactly. Each property method is a method (i.e. an class-specific function) that can be set up to do a particular kind of monkeying with the referent to which the original property was applied.

The two main advantages of encapsulating these functions in classes are that anyone who is defining a property can provide state (i.e. class attributes) for that property if necessary, and can also create sets of related properties using inheritance.

A more subtle advantage is that using a class-based interface for specifying properties gives us a clean way to extend that interface at a later time, should we miss some useful feature in the initial design.