However, method chaining is completely counterintuitive, because it's not natural to have $object->make_head('larger') return the object with the head made larger. One would expect it, like most methods, to return true on success and false on failure.

Well, it does return true on success. And when you provide for method chaining you usually use exception handling and not inband error codes. As for indenting the chain, thats a matter of taste. All I know is that I sure am glad I can type:

print Data::Dumper->new([$foo],[qw(foo)])->Indent(2)->Purity(2)->Dump(
+);
[download]

Instead of

print do{my $d=Data::Dumper->new([$foo],[qw(foo)]); $d->Indent(2); $d-
+>Purity(2); $d->Dump()};
[download]

And any hard and fast rule that says I can't/shouldn't do the above I would reject as being utterly unworkable in practice.

As I said elsewhere in this thread, the probable and common usage case should be the deciding factor in how a given method behaves. One shouldn't have to contort oneself to fit into some arbitrary coding scheme when there is no reason to. The Perl motto for things like this is that easy things should be easy and hard things possible. Selecting a method design that meets these requirements is the only design criteria as far as I am concerned.
---
demerphq

_{<Elian> And I do take a kind of perverse pleasure in having an OO assembly language...}