http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=821618

mboudreau has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I can't find this situation discussed in "Programming Perl" (the camel book), "Perl Cookbook" (Christiansen & Torkington), or "Object Oriented Perl" (Conway), but I'm afraid it's a basic OO question with an obvious answer I've just missed. I throw myself on the mercy of the Monks.

I have two packages, "NLMWriter" and "ManifestWriter", that each have subroutines with common names: "new" (a constructor) and "writeInstance" (writes out an XML fragment using data from the newly constructed object).

I assume lots of packages use "new" as the name of their constructor.

When I try to use both packages in a script, I get the "subroutine redefined" error when the second package is loaded. It seems to me that this should be possible, and I should simply have to call each subroutine with the correct package name to avoid confusion, e.g.,

my $nlmwriter = new UCP::NLMWriter; $nlmwriter->writeInstance();

What am I missing?

Package 1

package UCP::NLMWriter; use strict; use vars qw(@ISA @EXPORT @EXPORT_OK $VERSION $debug); require Exporter; @ISA = qw(Exporter); @EXPORT = qw(&new &writeInstance); @EXPORT_OK = (); $VERSION = 1.0; $debug = 0; sub new { # stuff here } sub writeInstance { # stuff here } 1;

Package 2 looks nearly the same, with different code in the "new" and "writeInstance" subroutines.

My test script:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use UCP::NLMWriter; use UCP::ManifestWriter;