use Perl

• Perl::Critic's RequireExplicitPackage Policy (Score:1)

  by thaljef (6477) on 2006.11.15 3:59 (#51650) Homepage

  The RequireExplicitPackage policy arose out of some code really bad legacy code that I have at work. A lot of it was written for Perl 4, and the author's didn't really understand how to use namespaces. Consider this example:

  In file Foo.pm:
  sub frobulator{ print shift; }
our $SHIZZLE = 42;

package Foo;

sub foo { return main::frobulator( @_ ) }


  In file my_script.pl:
  use Foo;
Foo::foo( $SHIZZLE );

  Since $SHIZZLE and &frobulator are declared before the package statement in Foo.pm, they wind up in the caller's namespace (main). So Foo::foo will only work if it is loaded by main. And when my_script starts loading other libraries that might also load Foo, then it become a big steaming pile.

  I trully hope that sane developers will never encounter this problem. But I'm frequently surprised how much insanity there is in the world :)

  Reply to This