note adrianh <blockquote><em>What if I could make the base class dog smarter and have it instantiate the subclasses for me?</em></blockquote> <p>For those who don't know this approach of having a single class instantiate different subclasses depending on the arguments is a common design pattern called an Abstract Factory (or sometimes Kit). If you keep an eye out you'll start seeing it everywhere (e.g. [cpan://DBI] instantiates different classes depending on the arguments to <code>connect</code>).</p> <p>[cpan://Class::Factory] provides a little framework for rolling this sort of stuff together if you don't want to do it yourself.</p> 339131 339131