perlquestion
mboudreau
<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>I assume lots of packages use "new" as the name of their constructor.</p>
<p>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.,</p>
<code>
my $nlmwriter = new UCP::NLMWriter;
$nlmwriter->writeInstance();
</code>
<p>What am I missing?</p>
<p>Package 1<p>
<code>
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;
</code>
<p>Package 2 looks nearly the same, with different code in the "new" and "writeInstance" subroutines.</p>
<p>My test script:</p>
<code>
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use UCP::NLMWriter;
use UCP::ManifestWriter;
</code>