📘 Constructors in Raku classes

You may have noticed in the previous examples that two different approaches to creating a typed variable were used.

The first was via an explicit call of the new constructor. In this case, a new instance was created.

my $a = A.new;

In the second, a variable was declared as a typed variable. Here, a container was created.

my A $a;

Creating a container means not only that the variable will be allowed to host an object of that class but also that you will still need to create that object itself.

my A $a = A.new;

Let us consider an example of a class which involves one public method and one public data field.

class A {
    has $.x = 42;
    method m {
        say "A.m";
    }
}

The internal public variable $.x is initialized with the constant value.

Now, let us create a scalar container for the variable of the A class.

my A $a;

The container is here, and we know its type, but there are no data yet. At this moment, the class method may be called. It will work, as it is a class method and does not require any instance with real data.

$a.m; # Prints “A.m”

Meanwhile, the $.x field is not available yet.

say $a.x; # Error: Cannot look up attributes in a A type object

We need to create an instance object by calling a constructor first.

my A $b = A.new;
say $b.x; # Prints 42

Please note that the initialization (= 42) only happens when a constructor is called. Prior to this, there is no object, and thus no value can be assigned to an attribute.

The new method is inherited from the Mu class. It accepts a list of the named arguments. So, this method can be used on any object with any reasonable arguments. For instance:

my A $c = A.new(x => 14);
say $c.x; # 14, not 42

Note that the name of the field (x) may not be quoted. An attempt of A.new(‘x’ => 14) will fail because it will be interpreted as a Pair being passed as a positional parameter.

Alternatively, you can use the :named(value) format for specifying named parameters:

my A $c = A.new :x(14); # Or A.new(:x(14)) if you wish
say $c.x; # 14

For the more sophisticated constructors, the class’s own BUILD submethod may be defined. This method expects to get a list of the named arguments.

class A {
    # Two fields in an object.
    # One of them will be calculated in the constructor.
    has $.str;
    has $!len;

    # The constructor expects its argument named ‘str’.
    submethod BUILD(:$str) {
        # This field is being copied as is:
        $!str = $str;

        # And this field is calculated:
        $!len = $str.chars;
    }

    method dump {
        # Here, we print the current values.
        # The variables are interpolated as usual
        # but to escape an apostrophe character from
        # the variable name, a pair of braces is added.
        "{$.str}'s length is $!len.".say;
    }
}

my $a = A.new(str => "Perl");
$a.dump;

This programme prints the following output:

Perl’s length is 4.