[VPM] stupid stupid stupid

[Nathanael Kuipers]

*sigh*

I'm writing a parser module for a research tool that we use.  I've sort of 
been "raised" in OO Perl, so by default I write OO modules.  Here is my 
synopsis for what I want to be able to do:

my $struct_ref = BIO::vmatchIO->new(*FH)->parse();

And here's the constructor:

sub new () {
	my ($class, $fh) = @_;
	bless (\FileHandle->new($fh), (ref($class) || $class));
}

Later, the parse method calls a support method, _check_format(), to decide 
what output format it's looking at, and the following line throws an error 
("can't locate object method getline via package BIO::vmatchIO..."):

while (my $line = $this->getline()) {}

Messing with @ISA (via use base pragma) just gets me a "Not a GLOB reference 
at ...Handle.pm line 407" when I test the module with a script where I pass a 
reference to an opened filehandle to the constructor above.

Is it clear what I am trying to do and how Perl isn't DWIM?  I've never tried 
re-blessing an object into my own package before, what's the best way to 
accomplish this?

And then in a fit of curiosity I took out all the OO stuff and instead put the 
parse() method in @EXPORT.  In the test script that uses BIO::vmatchIO,  
calling parse() threw an error because there was no parse method in the main:: 
package (obviously).  I almost flew off the handle (no pun intended) at that 
point and angrily stuffed my OO features back in.

Any ideas on either approach?

Thanks.

Nathanael