Singleton and unblessed refereces.

[tobias_hofer]

Hello Monks,

I have wrapped the access to a hardware-debugger in a perl module. I have not implemented it in OO-Style (to access stuff by the $self reference i.e.), so a call to GetInstance will return the package-local variable which is the handle to the Win32-OLE Debugger instance. But using the debugger by the variable outside the package breaks and the varialble turns out to be a unblessed reference. Why?

When I am using the debugger by the variable inside the package its working fine.

UPDATE: once $debugger is initialized it is a blessed reference to the OLE Object

Here the code snippets

package myDebugger;

use strict;
use warning;
use Win32;
use Win32::OLE;
use Win32::OLE qw( in with );
use Win32::OLE::Const 'UDE';
...

my $debugger;

sub GetInstance {
    if ( defined $debugger) {
        return $debugger;
    }
    else {
                #Initialize Debugger and set $debugger
        DebuggerInit();
        (defined $debugger) ? return $debugger
          : print "Can't initialize debugger, please check!" );
        return 0;
    } 
}

Any help and advice is highly welcome!

Best regards!
Tobias