[enhancement] Add a reactive $bot.listen method that automatically reads messages

[trosel]

Would it be possible to add a listen method that just listens for updates with a start block?

So you could utilize P6's nice react whenever system instead of using callbacks and what-not?

Or does the telegram API not allow for the constant connection?

[GildedHonour]

@WildYorkies can you elaborate?

[trosel]

For example, look at this section of a javascript bot library for telegram: https://github.com/mast/telegram-bot-api#retrieve-messages-sent-to-your-bot

Perl 6 has a really nice abstraction for listening to messages that are emitted. Is that out of scope for this library?

[GildedHonour]

@WildYorkies I'm not familiar with that yet. Can you show how a user would use it if it was added?

[trosel]

Good question!

Using the JS library as an example, if someone passes an "updates" boolean to Telegram::Bot.new($token, :updates), it would actually make the returned $bot a Supply that emits various messages.

use Telegram;

var $bot = Telegram::Bot.new($token, :updates);

react {
    whenever $bot -> $message {
        when 'message'      { say $message; }
        when 'inline.query' { say $message; }
    }
}

Of course, I'm no expert on asynchrony. I'm just thinking about how Perl 6 might be able to mimmick the JS functionality described in what I linked above. Obviously, the actual API for this module could be different from the JS one, though.

edit: See this function in the js lib for how they do it. They use the EventEmitter library, which is built in to Perl 6 by default :)

[GildedHonour]

@WildYorkies probably yes, but later.