Re^2: Bareword Package Names

[martin]

What tobyink demonstrated is that a bareword will act as a procedure call if (and only if) a subroutine of that name is known. Perl's auto-quoting of barewords will only kick in in the absence of such a subroutine. Any kind of explicit quoting, of course, will also avoid procedure calls.

my $object3 = 'Foo::Bar'->new;
say ref $object3;   # says "Foo::Bar"

So we now have established by different examples that trailing double-colons can act like quoting.

There may be caveats though. In some places where perl looks for barewords, the package-quoted bareword does not seem to lose its bareword-likeness.

use strict;
use warnings;
package Foo::Bar;
package main;
print Foo::Bar::;    # warns:
# Name "Foo::Bar" used only once: possible typo
# print() on unopened filehandle Bar
print Foo::Bar::, "Baz\n"; # prints Foo::BarBaz

Perl has to distinguish whether print with a single argument is called as print HANDLE or print LIST, and apparently uses a rather simple heuristic for this.

I try to avoid ambiguity with print and always use the print HANDLE LIST syntax for printing to handles.

[jmlynesjr]

See Programming Perl 4th Edition page 389 - Symbol Tables.

"Symbol tables are stored in a hash whose name is the same as the package, but with two colons appended. The main symbol table's name is thus %main::."

"Likewise, the symbol table or the Red::Blue package is named %Red::Blue::."

James

Also see page 423 - Package-Quoted Classes.

"The final syntactic ambiguity with the indirect object style of method invocation is that it may not be parsed as a method call at all, because the current package may have a subroutine of the same name as the method...there is a way to resolve this ambiguity while still keeping the indirect object syntax: package-quote the class name by appending a double colon to it."

   $obj = method CLASS::;   # forced to be "CLASS"->method