Pragmatic directives
Pragmatic directives cause the language to operate in a specific manner, allowing support for operational variances within the program code (possibly by the loading of specific or alternative modules).
The task is to list any pragmatic directives supported by the language, demostrate how to activate and deactivate the pragmatic directives and to describe or demonstate the scope of effect that the pragmatic directives have within a program.
Perl
By convention pragmatic modules are named using lowercase letters.
- List of pragmatic modules
- diagnostics
- english
- feature
- integer
- lib
- ops
- sort
- strict
- switch
- warnings
- Utilization
Pragmatic modules have local scope and are utilized using the use directive:
<lang perl>use warnings; # use warnings pragma module use strict; # use strict pragma module</lang>
To disable behaviour of a pragmatic module:
<lang perl>no warnings; # disable warnings pragma module no strict; # disable strict pragma module</lang>
Python
Python has the __future__ module which controls certain features:
- Python 3.2
<lang python>Python 3.2 (r32:88445, Feb 20 2011, 21:30:00) [MSC v.1500 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32 Type "copyright", "credits" or "license()" for more information. >>> import __future__ >>> __future__.all_feature_names ['nested_scopes', 'generators', 'division', 'absolute_import', 'with_statement', 'print_function', 'unicode_literals', 'barry_as_FLUFL'] >>> </lang>
('barry_as_FLUFL' is an April fools joke)
- Python 2.7
<lang python>Python 2.7.2 (default, Jun 12 2011, 14:24:46) [MSC v.1500 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32 Type "copyright", "credits" or "license()" for more information. >>> import __future__ >>> __future__.all_feature_names ['nested_scopes', 'generators', 'division', 'absolute_import', 'with_statement', 'print_function', 'unicode_literals'] >>> </lang>
UNIX Shell
- List of pragmatic directives
- -v output the script line before it is executed
- -x output the command line arguments
- Utilization
Pragmatic directives remain effective, until they are deactivated, or the end of the script is reached:
<lang sh>set -vx # Activate both script line output and command line arguments pragma set +vx # Deactivate both pragmatic directives</lang>