[VPM] Symbolic references with use strict in effect.

[Adam Parkin]

Hi all, I have a question for the Perl guru's on this list.  What I want 
to do is have my Perl script read from a text file some config data that 
looks something like:

[DataEntry]
SubRoutineToHandleThisEntry="foo"
ArgumentsToSub="hello world"

The idea is that the string "foo" is supposed to be the name of a 
subroutine in my Perl script, and the string "hello world" is the 
argument to pass to this subroutine.  I can do something like this:

$nameOfSub = "foo";       # name of sub to call
$args = "hello world!";   # args to pass to sub

&$nameOfSub ($args);      # call foo() via a symbolic reference

sub foo {
      print "In foo with args: @_\n";
}

And this works, but there is (IMHO) one very major problem with this: it 
is a symbolic reference, and thus if I put "use strict" at the top of my 
script, this trick no longer works.  Does anybody have a way of getting 
around this limitation?  I *very* much want "use strict" to be in effect 
for my script, but I still want the flexibility of being able to read 
from a file the name of a subroutine to call.  I could do something like 
have a hash in my script which maps string tokens to subroutine 
references, like so:

my %tokenToSubHash = ( "foo" => \&foo, "bar" => \&bar);

&{$tokenToSubHash{"foo"}}("hello world");

but this just seems a bit awkward as I now have to make sure I have an 
entry in this hash for every subroutine which is "visible" from the 
config file.

Anybody have any other creative ideas?

Thanks in advance.
-- 
Adam Parkin
E-mail: pzelnip at telus.net
--------------------------
At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will
find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on
the computer.