[tpm] Subroutine arcana

[Jim Graham]

Hi 

  Thanks for the compliment :)

  Just to follow up on the anonymous subroutine assigned to a scalar: I saw somewhere (perl.com?) that this is a way to have private
methods in a class. This is one of the complaints against Perl's OO model: all methods declared as subs are visible. This trick is
one way to make private methods:

   my $private_method = sub { }

Imagine:
--------
 package foo

 sub new
 {
  ....
  bless $self, $class;
 }  

 my $private_method = sub {};

 sub public_method
 {

  #-- call private method
  $private_method->( @args );
 }

 new and public_method are visible, $private_method is not.


I think this is discussed in TheDamien's Object Oriented Perl, and this thread
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=200102


  - jim



 
-----Original Message-----
From: toronto-pm-bounces+jim_graham=sympatico.ca at pm.org [mailto:toronto-pm-bounces+jim_graham=sympatico.ca at pm.org] On Behalf Of
arocker at vex.net
Sent: May 21, 2007 12:18 PM
To: tpm at to.pm.org
Subject: Re: [tpm] Subroutine arcana


Thanks to everyone for the help on this topic, especially Jim Graham for
the code examples. (In any discussion of programming topics, a functioning
example beats 4 aces AND a Smith & Wesson.)

My mistakes were:

1. Believing what my course notes said, without verifying them. How many
innocent minds have I corrupted?
2. Not replacing the 2nd Edition Camel with the 3rd, which did mention
nesting subroutines. (Confirmed from a CD version.)
3. Assuming that defining an anonymous subroutine would cause it to be
executed at definition time. (If you assign the result of a function to a
scalar, the function gets evaluated. An anonymous subroutine definition
looks like a function, but it just assigns the subroutine's reference to
the scalar.)

Oh well, egg is said to be good for the complexion.




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