What about Perl "typed lexical"

[notavaiable42]

Dear bscan,

first of all thank you very much for this great work. I stumbled upon perlnavigator a few months ago and could not belief that such a great thing is out there readily available for use. Thank you very much.

After using it for several months now and heavily in the last few weeks in conjunction with Moose, I was wondering whether it was possible to have Smart context-aware autocompletion and navigation for Perl typed-lexicals.

Consider the following:

my $car = My::Package::Name::Car->new();

When I now use the $car variable like $car-> I will get Smart context-aware autocompletion and navigation from perlnavigator.

But when I do the following thing:

my $cars = My::Package::Name::Car->list();
my $car = $cars->[0];

And again use the $car variable like $car-> I will not get Smart context-aware autocompletion and navigation.

This makes perfect sense to me because how should perlnavigator tell which type we are using.

So I tried as follows:

my $cars = My::Package::Name::Car->list();
my My::Package::Name::Car $car = $cars->[0];

And hoped that with the typed-lexical I could give perlnavigator a hint what class we are about to deal with. But sadly no Smart context-aware autocompletion and navigation appeared.

So here is my question: Is this feasible and if so could you do us this favour an implement it. That would be awesome.

Anyways thank you for all your efforts and please keep it up.

Yours Zachary

[bscan]

Hi @notavaiable42, thanks for starting the discussion.

The Perl Navigator doesn't currently support typed-lexicals, but it does support type comments with "isa" like:

my $foo = $dt; # $foo isa DateTime

One issue with typed-lexicals is that they don't work in subroutine signatures or multi-valued assignment like my ($foo, $bar) = ...
The type comment syntax should work across everything. You should be able to comment anywhere in the file, and it will assume all instances of $foo have that type. This is somewhat of a limitation because the Navigator doesn't apply much in terms of scoping rules, but also adds flexibility around comment layout.

There is some discussion here as well: #151

That said, I like the idea of supporting the my TYPE $var syntax as well if people are using it. It's probably not that hard, I'm not sure why I skipped this valid syntax to begin with. All of the work would be in the parser https://github.com/bscan/PerlNavigator/blob/main/server/src/parser.ts

[notavaiable42]

Dear @bscan,

thanks for your quick response. I just tried the thing with the type comments and it works like a breeze. That absolutely suffices for the moment, you blew me off my socks. To me the perlnavigator is truly a productivity enhancer and makes programming Perl so much more fun.

Thanks a bunch and please keep it up.

Yours Zachary