[Bioperl-l] Feature/Annotation rollback(update)

[Chris Fields]

I managed to find your comments (as well as ones from Ewan, Jason,  
and a few others) on the mail list archives, so I'll link to them.   
The problem will be fixing the several places where overloading is  
assumed but no longer exists (i.e. in write_* methods), but we can  
probably pinpoint those by throwing or warning when overloading is  
assumed.

My thought is to either modify as_text() or add a new display_text()  
method to all AnnotationI that explicitly does what the overloading  
implied (print the annotation in a specified or assumed way).  We  
could then delegate to that in the stringification overload (with  
appropriate deprecation warnings) until 1.6, where we remove it  
completely.  Something like:

my $link1 = Bio::Annotation::DBLink->new(-database => 'TSC',
                                         -primary_id => 'TSC0000030',
                                         -tagname => "tag2);

# either
print $link1->display_text(),"\n";
# or ...
print $link1->as_text("display"),"\n";
# prints "TSC:TSC0000030"

# default human readable
print $link1->as_text(),"\n";
# prints "Direct database link to TSC0000030 in database TSC"

print "$link1\n";
# gets a deprecation warning for now, removed completely for 1.6

chris

On Aug 25, 2007, at 11:58 PM, Hilmar Lapp wrote:

> The reason was to provide for backward compatibility with the  
> original API in which tag values were scalars, not objects. The  
> idea was that if someone relied on that and treats the object as a  
> scalar (comparison, printing, etc), the operator overloading would  
> take care of that.
>
> So by going back to the original API the overloading should become  
> obsolete, at least theoretically.
>
> The overloading can cause some very subtle issues that I pointed  
> out in an earlier email. It's one of those really "clever" tricks  
> that just make it very hard for newcomers to understand what's  
> going on in their code.
>
> 	-hilmar
>
> On Aug 25, 2007, at 6:12 PM, Chris Fields wrote:
>
>> I have finished rolling back most of the specific changes made prior
>> to the 1.5 release and have relevant tests passing:
>>
>> http://www.bioperl.org/wiki/Feature_Annotation_rollback#First_round
>>
>> Operator overloading of Bio::Annotation objects will be trickier to
>> debug as tons of tests fail when the overloading is removed:
>>
>> http://www.bioperl.org/wiki/Feature_Annotation_rollback#Second_round
>>
>> I'll start looking into fixes.  I don't like overloads from a
>> personal standpoint (problems w/ long-term code maintenance), but was
>> there a more specific reason for removing them?
>>
>> chris
>> _______________________________________________
>> Bioperl-l mailing list
>> Bioperl-l at lists.open-bio.org
>> http://lists.open-bio.org/mailman/listinfo/bioperl-l
>
> -- 
> ===========================================================
> : Hilmar Lapp  -:-  Durham, NC  -:-  hlapp at gmx dot net :
> ===========================================================
>
>
>
>
>

Christopher Fields
Postdoctoral Researcher
Lab of Dr. Robert Switzer
Dept of Biochemistry
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign