Re: How to delete a method in a subclass?

[gaal]

What do you want to happen if someone calls such a method?

Anyway, yeah -- override the method in the subclass. Have it throw an exception, or do nothing. If you have lots of methods like that (then you should rethink your design, but) you can do something like

sub meth1 { obsoleted }
sub meth2 { obsoleted }
sub meth3 {}             # do nothing, quietly.
# [...]

sub obsoleted {
    require Carp;
    Carp::croak "obsoleted method called"; # exception, with stack tra
+ce

    # or, just complain but go on with the show.
    Carp::cluck "obsoleted method called";
}

[ihb]

I'm a fan of keeping the parenthesis for user-defined subroutines, and you give an example of why.

Your methods will have the string "obsoleted" in them. With warnings enabled a warning will be issued. With strict enabled it'll be a fatal error.

This is because when the methods are defined there is no &obsoleted subroutine and you don't indicate it's a subroutine in any way.

Defining &obsoleted above the methods would solve this, but personally I'd just use parenthesis and not worry about where I define subroutines.

ihb

[gaal]

Yes, that's a good point++.