On 6/20/05, BÁRTHÁZI András <andras@[...].hu>  wrote:
>  Hi,
>  
>  >>- in natural languages, synonims are very often - alias is a synonim
>  >
>  > Perl is modeled on natural languages, but that doesn't mean it is one.
>  >  At its core, Perl is a limited, artificial language being explicitly
>  > designed with certain goals.  One of those goals is that it should be
>  > as small as possible given the feature set we want it to support; an
>  > `alias` built-in that essentially duplicates an existing feature goes
>  > against that goal.
>  
>  I can agree with it, but I think it would be a great feature. And it
>  doesn't depends on Perl 6, but it depends on Parrot, as I think.
>  
>  >>- in Perl 6, currently there's no way to create a reference to a
>  >>   variable, _with the context of the variable_, too (binding just give
>  >>   me possibility to bind a variable into another, but the new variable
>  >>   won't be automatically have the same context, as the binded one)
>  >
>  > I'm not sure what you mean by "context" here.  Context has a very
>  > specific meaning in Perl, representing the type a function's caller is
>  > expecting; this doesn't seem to be what you're talking about here.
>  >
>  >>alias kilobytes, kilobyte;
>  >
>  > This is a couple punctuation symbols short of:
>  >     &kilobytes := &kilobyte;
>  > Or maybe:
>  >     &kilobytes ::= &kilobyte;
>  > I'm not really sure what behavior you have in mind for alias.
>  
>  "&kilobytes := &kilobyte;" will not work for you (try it), because you
>  have to declare the "variable" kilobytes - in the default strict mode.
>  But you can't say for ex. "my &kilobytes", if you want to export it.

So you say `our &kilobytes ::= &kilobyte` (or `:=`, you still haven't
said if alias works at compile time or runtime) and call it a day.

IIUC, traits like `is exported` are attached to the container, not the
name; since aliasing connects a name to a container, you should be
fine on that front.  (If it doesn't work, that's because `is exported`
does something funky that `alias` would have to treat as a special
case; certainly other traits like `is rw` would follow a
`:=`-binding.)

>  Anyway, "alias" is a Ruby term, and if Parrot will be able to support
>  Ruby, then it will be able to support this function, too.

As I've said before, Perl supports `alias`--it's just spelled `:=`.

-- 
Brent 'Dax' Royal-Gordon <brent@[...].com> 
Perl and Parrot hacker