Templat...Context(3)

okay bestie 💖 this is the Templat...Context(3) page, a User Contributed Perl Documentation moment, and we're talking about Template::Stash::Context.

🌸 NAME 🌸

Template::Stash::Context - Experimetal stash allowing list/scalar context definition. Yes, "Experimetal" is literally how it's spelled in the NAME line — no cap, we keep the typo 🫶.

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

use Template;
use Template::Stash::Context;

my $stash = Template::Stash::Context->new(\%vars);
my $tt2   = Template->new({ STASH => $stash });

💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

Okay so this is an alternate stash object that includes a patch from Craig Barratt to implement various new virtual methods. The glow-up? It lets a dotted template variable say whether object methods and subroutines should be called in scalar context or list context. It adds a little overhead to each stash call, and the author is a little wary of applying that to the core default stash without investigating the effects first. So for now it's implemented as a separate stash module, which will allow us to test it out, benchmark it and switch it in or out as we require. Slay, honestly ✨.

This is what Craig has to say about it:

Here's a better set of features for the core. Attached is a new version of Stash.pm (based on TT2.02) that:

• supports the special op "scalar" that forces scalar context on function calls, eg:

cgi.param("foo").scalar

calls cgi.param("foo") in scalar context (unlike my wimpy scalar op from last night). Array context is the default.

With non-function operands, scalar behaves like the perl version (eg: no-op for scalar, size for arrays, etc).

• supports the special op "ref" that behaves like the perl ref. If applied to a function the function is not called. Eg:

cgi.param("foo").ref

does not call cgi.param and evaluates to "CODE". Similarly, HASH.ref, ARRAY.ref return what you expect.

• adds a new scalar and list op called "array" that is a no-op for arrays and promotes scalars to one-element arrays.
• allows scalar ops to be applied to arrays and hashes in place, eg: ARRAY.repeat(3) repeats each element in place.
• allows list ops to be applied to scalars by promoting the scalars to one-element arrays (like an implicit "array"). So you can do things like SCALAR.size, SCALAR.join and get a useful result.

This also means you can now use x.0 to safely get the first element whether x is an array or scalar.

The new Stash.pm passes the TT2.02 test suite. But I haven't tested the new features very much. One nagging implementation problem is that the "scalar" and "ref" ops have higher precedence than user variable names.

🦋 AUTHOR 🦋

Andy Wardley <abw@wardley.org>

<http://wardley.org/>

🎀 VERSION 🎀

1.63, distributed as part of the Template Toolkit version 3.100, released on 30 March 2020.

👑 COPYRIGHT 👑

Copyright (C) 1996-2022 Andy Wardley. All Rights Reserved.

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

Template::Stash

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byeee bestie 💅 this page is from perl v5.42.0, dated 2024-06-23, and its footer tag is Templat...Context(3) 🫶