use Perl

I was thinking about putting together a talk about different programming styles and I decided to loosely translate the following snippet from Squeak (a free implementation of Smalltalk):

hello: times say: text
    (times > 100)
        ifTrue: [ Transcript show: 'You will get bored!']
        ifFalse: [1 to: times do: [:i | (Transcript show: text) cr]]

It's like some kind of bizarro mirror universe where everything looks OK until you peer closely at it. Since Squeak doesn't have if/then statements, what's really going on is the "greater than" comparison is actually a constructor and ifTrue and ifFalse are actually messages sent to the boolean object. It can choose to act on those messages or not and if it does, the code in the square brackets is evaluated (think "anonymous sub".) As a result, you really do have complete encapsulation and you could even reorder those messages if you so desired. In a traditional if/else statement, that's not always as easy.

To translate that into Perl, you might have the body of the method looking similar to this:

(Boolean->gt($times, 100))
    ->ifTrue(  sub {print "You will get bored!" } )
    ->ifFalse( sub {print $text for 1 .. $times } );

(Yes, I cheated with the range operator.)

And the relevent methods in Boolean might look like this:

package Boolean;

sub gt {
    my ($class, $num1, $num2) = @_;
    bless {
        true => ($num1 > $num2)
    } => $class;
}

sub ifTrue {
    my $self = shift;
    $self->{true} && shift->();
    return $self;
}

sub ifFalse {
    my $self = shift;
    ! $self->{true} && shift->();
    return $self;
}

1;

No if statements at all (though they're there in disguise.)

I'm not recommending this particular technique, but I did think it was a fascinating look at "pure OO" and its implications. This has proven very helpful to me as it taught me to take a closer look at how I use if statements. Much of my code is now conceptually cleaner due to finding a different way of thinking about the problem.