id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc	lang	patch	platform
1053	[TODO] Allow Parrot Hashes to have PMC keys	bacek		"Originally created at http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=54236


As seen in 54220, I discovered to my chagrin that not only do Parrot
hashes have only string keys, that trying to pull the keys out as PMCs
(presumably Strings) fails.

Aside from the ugly failure, this design seems broken in the face of
languages like Perl6 that expect to be able to use non-string hash keys.
Both for direct use by Perl6 internals, and for interoperability with
other languages, it seems like at least one core Parrot hash class
should use PMC keys. These should be either readable directly as PMCs,
or stringified if assigned to a string register. (This latter case may
be optimized if the key PMC is a String, of course, but that's a
different issue).

This ticket can be considered in some sense the converse of 54220. That
ticket asks that ordinary string keys be extractable as String PMCs,
whereas this one asks that general PMC keys work, and that they
stringify if extracted as ordinary strings.


-'f"	todo	closed	normal		configure	trunk	medium	done