(Ovid) Re: Would you use 'goto' here?

Ugh! I forgot to explain this version of goto. From the docs:

     The "goto-&NAME" form is quite different from the other forms of
     "goto". In fact, it isn't a goto in the normal sense at all, and
     doesn't have the stigma associated with other gotos. Instead, it
     substitutes a call to the named subroutine for the currently
     running subroutine. This is used by "AUTOLOAD" subroutines that
     wish to load another subroutine and then pretend that the other
     subroutine had been called in the first place (except that any
     modifications to "@_" in the current subroutine are propagated
     to the other subroutine.) After the "goto", not even "caller"
     will be able to tell that this routine was called first.
[download]

In other words, it's like the current subroutine doesn't exist. As an editor, I could have edited my parent node to include this, but that seemed rather abusive of that right :(

Cheers,
Ovid

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Comment on (Ovid) Re: Would you use 'goto' here? Download Code

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Re: (Ovid) (2): Would you use 'goto' here?
by dmmiller2k (Chaplain) on Dec 06, 2001 at 20:11 UTC

Clearly, the "goto-&NAME" form was intended for use by the low-level "magic" (as perrin so aptly put it in Re: Would you use 'goto' here?) of AUTOLOAD, which, just as clearly, is a dispatch function. Since you're also using it for dispatching, it seems on the one hand appropriate.

On the other hand, quite a few responses to this node (in particular, Masem's, in which he says, "I think the fact that you had to explain the special form in your errata to the original message is a good enough reason") seem to indicate that this form of goto may not be widely used enough to consider it an "idiom" (in contrast with some other widely used constructs nevertheless frequently misunderstood by experienced C/C++/Java programmers new to Perl).

If your goal, as you say, is to "optimize for correctness and clarity", then this might not be the ideal solution. How important is the call stack in a production app anyway? Isn't that more to do with debugging than with normal usage?

IMHO, you're much better off switching to:

return edit_office_product(@_) if $query->param('officeID');
[download]

as first suggested by runrig in Re: Would you use 'goto' here? in this thread.

dmm


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