in reply to inheritance turns back and bites
For the specific question, a better option might be to use overload and do dispatch based on the value you get. Something like:
package SomeData; use overload '+' => 'add', '-' => 'subtract', fallback => 1; sub add { my ($x, $y) = @_[0..1]; ($x, $y) = ($y, $x) if $_[2]; $self->{is_number} ? $x + $y : $x . $y; }
Now, personally, I would never overload + to act as string concatenation. Concatenation isn't commutative, which breaks the implicit contract most people have with addition. As well, how do you define multiplication for strings?
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