[Raleigh-talk] Messing around with symbol tables

[Paul Bennett]

On Wed, 02 Dec 2009 12:13:28 -0500, Michael Peters <mpeters at plusthree.com>  
wrote:

> On 12/02/2009 12:05 PM, Paul Bennett wrote:
>> I disagree. What if "$orig"::can() is overriden with something utterly
>> unlike capability testing? It would be outside what I consider safe,
>> sane, and consensual, but not implausible.
>
> The alternative is that if a module purposefully overrides can() so that  
> it behaves well (like for instance it has an AUTOLOAD method that can  
> dispatch cmp and clone) then your usage would fail. So the module author  
> tried to do the right thing but now it won't work because you ignored it.

You make a(n infuriatingly ;-) good point. I thought UNIVERSAL::can() was  
smart enough to check AUTOLOAD(), but it's certainly not going to check  
AUTOMETHOD() in Class::Std classes (for just one particularly  
close-to-home trivial example).

I don't see a PBP for capability checking (maybe I'm just not looking hard  
enough), so if anyone's got any ideas about what recommendations are out  
there, I'd love to hear about them. For now, I'm checking  
(UNIVERSAL::can() || $orig->can()), but that makes me uneasy on some  
hard-to-define gut level.



Thanks,



--
Paul