http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=19319


in reply to How do I make deterministic constructors?

You mean can you make your constructors prototyped so that the correct constructor gets invoked based on the number of parameters you provide, like you might do in C++?

I don't think you can do this in Perl, because Perl's version of prototypes isn't the same as C++'s. Differently-prototyped subroutines with the same name don't fly in Perl. I don't think.

My question would be: are you sure you need to do this? Perhaps there's a better way of handling this in Perl that doesn't require such a thing.

One way to do it would be to pass in the parameters as a hash, then just dump that hash into the hash-reference object that you create:

package R; sub new { my $this = shift; my $class = ref($this) || $this; my $self = { @_ }; bless $self, $class; }
Now people can create a new R object any way they please:
my $r1 = new R; my $r2 = new R (foo => 'bar'); my $r3 = new R (baz => 'quux', foo => 'bar');
and so on. Would that work for you?