Re: dynamic perl calls

[osunderdog]

It sounds like you want to do polymorphism. This is a quick example that sounds like a starting point for you.

child1.pm

package child1;

sub polyexample
  {
    my $class = shift;
    my $param1 = shift;
    my $param2 = shift;
    print "polyexample (child1) called with [$param1] and [$param2]\n"
+;
  }


1;

child2.pm

package child2;



sub polyexample
  {
    my $class = shift;
    my $param1 = shift;
    my $param2 = shift;
    print "polyexample (child2) called with [$param1] and [$param2]\n"
+;
  }


1;

main.pl

use strict;
use Carp;

my $class = shift;
my $method = shift;
my $param1 = shift;
my $param2 = shift;

eval("use $class");
if($@)
  {
    croak("Couldn't find package $class ($@) ");
  }

eval($class->$method($param1, $param2));
if($@)
  {
    croak ("couldn't invoke method #method on $class with params ($@)"
+)
  }

Finally, here are the two example invocations:

~/src/perl/poly$ perl main.pl child1 polyexample 1 2
polyexample (child1) called with [1] and [2]

~/src/perl/poly$ perl main.pl child2 polyexample 1 2
polyexample (child2) called with [1] and [2]

and an example failure

~/src/perl/poly$ perl main.pl child5 polyexample 1 2
Couldn't find package child5 (Can't locate child5.pm in @INC (@INC con
+tains: /etc/perl /usr/local/lib/perl/5.10.0 /usr/local/share/perl/5.1
+0.0 /usr/lib/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/perl/5.10 /usr/share/per
+l/5.10 /usr/local/lib/site_perl .) at (eval 1) line 2.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at (eval 1) line 2.

And many wonderful permutations of this exist.

[dsheroh]

That was my thought as well. This could also be combined with Module::Pluggable to deal with the external files aspect.

[TGI]

Method calls are not subject to strict subs. So you can do:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $sub = 'foo';

my @result_set = Dispatch->$sub( qw/bar baz/ );

package Dispatch;

sub foo {
    shift;

    print @_,"\n";
}