(elbie 2): What does this warning mean?

[elbie]

I was unaware that one could run into problems using the object orientet syntax. I went and looked in the Perl Cookbook, but all I saw was a line that recommended the "procedural farmat for casual use", but it didn't really give me much of a reason for it.

I don't have access to Object Oriented Perl. What sort of dangers are you referring to?

elbieelbieelbie

[davorg]

In the Cookbook, it's page 446 "A Warning on Indirect Object Notation" and in OOP it's pp98-101 "Another way to call a constructor".

To summarise, there are two problems with it:

1. The classname in method CLASS must be a bare symbol, a block or a scalar variable. It can't be just any old scalar expression. This can lead to surprising parsing.
2. Perl needs to guess whether the method is, in fact, a method or a function. It can sometimes get this wrong. Particularly if your method has the same name as a function in your main package.

In general it will work fine, but the times that it won't work are so difficult to keep a track of that it's best to never use it. There's no good reason not to use the alternative CLASS->method syntax, so I see it as a good habit to get into.

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