use Perl

• Huh? (Score:1)

  by jplindstrom (594)

  I'm confused.
  
  What does it mean to change package within a sub?
  • Re:Huh? (Score:2)

    by Ovid (2709)

    Well, package declarations are lexically scoped. It would have been simpler for me to have simply declared another package in that file and have the subroutine return a new object created from that package. Instead, just because of the way the refactoring worked, I had simply wrapped the package in the sub and now that I look at it, I can't see why this would be a bad thing.

    There's no real benefit that I can tell, but there's no real harm I can identify, either.
  • Re:Huh? (Score:2)

    by drhyde (1683)

    Quite simply, it means that when you enter the sub you're in one package, and then at some point during the sub the current package changes. I recently did something like that, and it was also because of some refactoring.

    I have a bunch of classes, all subclasses of a single class, and all pretty similar. I broke a ton of code out into a "helper" module which they all use. However, part of that is to call a method in the class's superclass, like this:

    package Foo;
    @ISA(qw(Bar));
    
    use HelperMethods;