Traits, rôles and other repurposed terms

[Jonathan Rockway]

* On Thu, Feb 07 2008, Jonathan Stowe wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-02-07 at 12:51 -0600, Jonathan Rockway wrote:
>> it will use "traits", although we prefer to spell it "roles".
>
> I admit it: I'm an arts graduate and musician who plays at being a
> computer programmer during the week. Now I *think* I know what you these
> mean but just to check could someone explain in a simple paragraph
> suitable for a naïve audience.

Sure.  The summary:
  Roles are a way to cleanly reuse code among classes that aren't related.

For example, say you have a bunch classes that determine equality
against some other object like this:

  sub equals {
      my ($self, $other_thing) = @_;
      return whether or not they're equal;
  }

This is fine, but now you want to have a not_equals method in each class
like:

  sub not_equals { !shift->equals(@_) }

Without roles, you have a few hackish options.  You can cut-n-paste that
method into all the files.  You can make your classes that do "equals"
inherit from a superclass which implements "not_equals". (This is how
the Catalyst plugin system works, as well as pretty much everything else
in the Perl world right now.)  Finally, you can "use Not::Equals" which
exports the "not_equals" symbol into the consuming class.

The first is not a real option.  The second is a misuse of "isa", but
works.  The third is the cleanest (from a pure "what does isa mean"
perspective), but can't handle conflicts or dependency-checking.

Roles aim to clean this up.  Dependencies can be checked at
role-application time ("not_equals" depends on "equals"), methods that
conflict can be renamed, and so on.

Please take a look at the Moose::Role documentation for more detail:

  http://search.cpan.org/~stevan/Moose-0.36/lib/Moose/Role.pm

This article shows an example of handling conflicting methods when
consuming multiple roles:

  http://use.perl.org/~Stevan/journal/35455
  

All in all, a very useful thing.  I don't know how I lived without them.

Regards,
Jonathan Rockway