Hi Zentara,
Thanks for all your posts.
Let me make my requirement very simple. Forget about object oriented programming a also whether B.pm is derived from Tk::Tree or not.
Just think about procedural programming. I just need to build the logic where the called function (i.e getItemStyle )can stringify the passed parameter set and make them the key of a hash. The value of the hash shoud be the created ItemStyle object. I am trying to write the pseudocode below :
&getItemStyle($tree, 'text', -anchor => 'w',-fg => 'red');
sub getItemStyle
{
my $obj = shift; ## holds $tree
my $type = shift; ## holds text
## Now stringify the "-anchor =>'w' -fg => 'red'
## and make them a hash key and create the ItemStyle.
## So that next time if I call getItemStyle with same
## same parameters(-anchor and -fg ), it does not create
## the ItemStyle all over again and checks the hash if
## the paramters exist as a key then returns its value.
## Also we need to sort the parameters so that if we
## cal getItemStyle with the same two parameters and
## reverse the order of mentioning them (-fg => red ,
## -anchor =>'w') , it considers it as the same call
## as (-anchor => 'w', -fg =>red) happened earlier .
Hope the problem is clear now. Main thing is to elegantly and easily stringify the parameters, use them as a hash key, store the object in the value corresponding to that key and return. If it is a new parameter set, then make a new key and create the itemstyle.