Re^4: Why Does Test::Deep Kill Test::Class

[Your Mother]

A bit late reply, sorry, but I find "()" to be quite nice. You just have to cultivate the habit of using it.

[fergal]

() would be fine if you didn't then have to type

use Foo::Bar::Woz::Snuts ();
Foo::Bar::Woz::Snuts::Wibble($x, $y)

Python gets it right (well better at least) with

from foo.bar.woz import snuts;
snuts.wibble(x, y)

and suchlike. This is pretty much impossible in Perl due to symbol table access being absolute, not relative.

[Your Mother]

You don't if the module does its exporting right, and most do.

use Foo::Bar::Woz::Snuts qw( Wibble );

I realize you're talking about having relative spaces in the code though. To me that would add arbitrary levels of (human) ambiguity for the hacker trying to read it. I think this could be solved in Perl too with some export/namespace alias magick but I wouldn't like or use the feature.

[fergal]

There is no ambiguity in how it's done in python and after 4 years of python, I've never had a problem or even heard a complaint about that. Howver, squishing it into Perl would be hard because you'd have to make it live side-by-side with the currently absolute package names and without introducing new syntax, you would have ambiguity and confusion.

Python doesn't provide any syntax for addressing packages with using an absolute name. You can do it but by digging around in sys.modules but it's not part of the language as such.

All that said, I have rarely missed Perl's absolute package scheme when writing python and I have often missed python's relative package scheme when writing Perl.