[ABE.pm] debug() from perltoot

[Faber J. Fedor]

I'm working through the perltoot; mostly copying and pasting code
snippets and trying to get them to work.  There's one debug routine in
perltoot that I don't get.  In the "Overridden Methods" section, the author 
says to add the following to the subclass:

    use Carp;
    my $Debugging = 0;

    sub debug {
        my $self = shift;
        confess "usage: thing->debug(level)"    unless @_ == 1;
        my $level = shift;
        if (ref($self))  {
            $self->{"_DEBUG"} = $level;
        } else {
            $Debugging = $level;            # whole class
        }
        $self->SUPER::debug($Debugging);
    }


Further down in my subclass code, I have things like

       carp $stmt."\n" if($Debugging);

In my calling program, I do this:

    my $newTable = SummaryTable->new();
    $newTable->debug(1);

and my carp-ing statement never get called.  

After working through this, I've come to one of two conclusions: either
every subclass has a $self->{_DEBUG} defined (which means it should go
into the superclass) or I replace 

        if (ref($self))  {
            $self->{"_DEBUG"} = $level;
        } else {
            $Debugging = $level;            # whole class
        }

with simply 

        $Debugging = $level;


So how is this overriding method supposed to work?


-- 
 
Regards,
 
Faber Fedor
President
Linux New Jersey, Inc.
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