I must admit that I too have fallen in the @ISA trap. But I wanted to look at your solution to extending an existing module. Not that long ago I was looking at using an OO module (I honestly don't remember which one), but this module didn't have a destructor. Instead, you were required to call some kind of clean up method, lets call it
Class::Finish(). Well, I'm not a big fan of making the programmer call something that Perl will happily do for you (if you call the method DESTROY) and so I thought about how to extend the class to add:
sub DESTROY
{
my $self = shift;
$self->Finish();
}
And the first idea that came to me was your idea of writing a wrapper object. But I didn't like the idea too much. The next idea (and I think this was someone
else's idea) was to do it like this:
{
package Class;
sub DESTROY
{
my $self = shift;
$self->Finish();
}
}
To replace an already existing method you would only need to add
no strict and (5.6+)
no warnings within the block. As it turns out, and the more advanced have already made this jump, you can just declare:
sub Class::DESTROY
{
my $self = shift;
$self->Finish();
}
Aint it grand? :-)