Re: Creating packages on the fly

[gellyfish]

I'm not entirely sure that what I am about to suggest is very sensible as it may well break all sorts of other things, so anyone of a sensitive nature should look away now.

It is entirely possible to add an AUTOLOAD subroutine to the UNIVERSAL package which every other package inherits from implicity, so you can do something like:

#!/usr.bin/perl
 
use strict;
use warnings;
 
 
Foo::Bar->baz();
 
Foo::Bar->baz();
 
package UNIVERSAL;
 
 
sub AUTOLOAD
{
   my ($class, @args) = @_;
 
   our $AUTOLOAD;
 
   (my $method = $AUTOLOAD) =~ s/.*:://;
 
   print "$AUTOLOAD was called via autoload\n";
 
   no strict 'refs';
 
    *{$AUTOLOAD} = sub { print "I'm alive\n"};
 
    $class->$method;
}

This creates your methods in unknown packages on the fly. If you want to do subclassing on the fly you can do something like:

#!/usr.bin/perl
 
use strict;
use warnings;
 
 
Foo::Bar->baz();
Foo::Bar->baz();
 
package UNIVERSAL;
 
 
sub AUTOLOAD
{
   my ($class, @args) = @_;
 
   our $AUTOLOAD;
 
   (my $method = $AUTOLOAD) =~ s/.*:://;
   (my $parent = $class) =~ s/::[^:]*$//;
 
 
   print "$AUTOLOAD was called via autoload\n";
 
   no strict 'refs';
 
   push @{"${class}::ISA"},$parent;
 
   $class->$method;
}
 
package Foo;
 
sub baz
{
   my ($self) = @_;
   print "I'm alive\n";
}

But don't say I didn't warn you that this was probably a bad idea

/J\