The whole point of the Class::Declarative effort, to me, is to enable me to write quick scripts in my fields of interest that don't slow me down enough with whatever I'm doing. In other words, when working with Word documents, the idea is to offload all the knowledge, all the lookup work inherent in dealing with OLE (and there's a lot) so I can actually conceive of the need for a script, start it, test it, and use it, within, say, an hour or so. If I go beyond that time, I might as well not have a scripting language - I need to finish the task, not spend a day crafting a way to automate it.
Last night, Win32::Word::Declarative managed to meet that need to a certain extent. Just the ability to remember that I can simply type
use Win32::Word::Declarative;document (active)do {...}
is enough to get me over some humps.
Not only that, the declarative framework gives me the start of a way to store knowledge accumulated. My task last night was to iterate over all the stories in a document - not the first time this has come up, of course. And this task is needlessly complicated, but now, for the first time, I have a way to package it up into a function that can easily be called. Now, I can simply say "foreach my $range in (^story_ranges())" and I'm done. It's still not as easy as it could be, but I no longer have to worry about that wacky double loop.
I'm sure I'm not the first programmer ever to be in the position of realizing that his accumulated codebase made things easier for him - it's not even the first time for me (the XMLAPI sure did make working with strings and structures in C much easier) - but it's immensely satisfying knowing that this work is starting to pay off in real terms.
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