[Wellington-pm] 'enum' for Perl?

[Cliff Pratt]

Grant McLean wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-04-16 at 20:20 +1200, Cliff Pratt wrote:
> 
>>Is there a way of doing enums in Perl?
>>
>>eg so that using the string ONE in a program has the same effect as using 1.
>>
>>exit ONE ; # exit 1
> 
> 
> You could say:
> 
>   use constant ONE => 1;
> 
> Or you could simply use a variable:
> 
>   my $ONE = 1;
> 
> Possibly with the addition of the Readonly module from CPAN:
> 
>   Readonly my $ONE => 1;
> 
> When you have a number of possible values that you want to assign
> symbolic names to, variables are easiest, eg:
> 
>   my($IDLE, $WAITING, $CONNECTED, $RECEIVING, $DISCONNECTING) = (1..10);
> 
> In that example, I declared an overly large range on the right of the
> assignment, so that I could easily add new states to the left as I
> needed them.
> 
Thanks Grant,

I can see how that works, but some modules export what appear to be 
variables, eg

use Glib qw(TRUE FALSE) ;

and you can then say, eg

my $debug = FALSE ;

Or is FALSE just a hidden subroutine that sets the return to the 
appropriate value?

Cheers,

Cliff

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