Re: perl vs python bindings for vim and tab page object access

On 6 January 2017, Nikolay Aleksandrovich Pavlov <zyx.vim@gmail.com>
wrote:
> 2017-01-06 5:56 GMT+03:00 Arif Khokar <arif.i.khokar@gmail.com>:
> > [I sent this to the vim_dev list earlier, but didn't get a response]
> >
> > After looking through the documentation for if_perl and if_pyth,
> > I noticed that the python bindings had the ability to query and
> > manipulate tab page objects, while the perl bindings did not.
> >
> > Is there a technical reason for the difference (i.e., a limitation
> > for the perl C bindings?), or is it something that was never
> > implemented?
>
> Perl is not so popular nowadays, so there are less authors willing
> to contribute to if_perl.xs. I do not think there are any technical
> reasons (I do not know XS, but I am the person who initially wrote
> Python tab page objects and can say that there should not be any
> problems on the Vim side and given that there are objects like $curbuf
> I do not see why there could not be something like $tabpages).

On a side note: if_perl doesn't allow variable bindings the way
if_pyth does. For this reason passing non-trivial data structures
back and forth between Vim and Perl is often more complicated than the
rest of the code combined. A while ago I looked into backporting that
feature from if_pyth, and I quickly realised that the main problem in
doing it is the explicit difference Perl makes between lists, arrays,
and references to said objects, which has no equivalent in Vim. And
even when no references are involved, the semantic is still somewhat
different. For example, in Perl you can do things like this:

$ perl -MData::Dumper -e '@a = ((1, 2), (3, 4)); print Dumper(\@a)'
$VAR1 = [
1,
2,
3,
4
];

which, among many other things, allows map() to change the number of
elements of its input:

$ perl -MData::Dumper -e '@a = map { (0, $_) } (1, 2); print Dumper(\@a)'
$VAR1 = [
0,
1,
0,
2
];

Doing the same in Vim is a lot more convoluted. Just FWIW.

/lcd

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