http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=237345

I had a little library which supported a number of interfaces: procedural, class-based and object-based. The _shift_self function called as my $self = &_shift_self looks at the caller's @_ and Does-What-I-Mean, possibly shifting the first arg or returning a class name.

A bigger example will follow.

package MyClass; use Scalar::Util qw(blessed); sub _shift_self { if(!defined $_[0]) { return __PACKAGE__; } elsif(blessed $_[0] && $_[0]->isa(__PACKAGE__) ) { return shift; } elsif ( $_[0] =~ /^[_a-zA-Z][\w:']*$/ # Legit package names && $_[0]->isa(__PACKAGE__) ) { # should it be UNIVERSAL::isa($_[0],__PACKAGE); ?? return shift; } else { return __PACKAGE__; } } sub new { my $self = &_shift_self; my $class = ref $self || $self; return bless [1], $class; } sub dump_self { my $self = &_shift_self; print '$self is <',Dumper($self), '> '; $self->do_something(@_); }

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Give me something $self-ish
by bsb (Priest) on Feb 21, 2003 at 04:51 UTC
    A bigger demo although it doesn't really show the usefulness.
    For me the usefulness was in easily providing multiple interfaces to the same C library.