Re: RFC: Data::Dumper::Simple

[NetWallah]

Wonderful! - I always hated the 2 issues with Data::Dumper - it wants a REFERENCE, and it wont easily tell you the variable NAME.

There was one additional nit - which perhaps you can pick -the need to say "print Dumper (\$blah)" - why keep repeating the "print" or "warn" .. wouldn't is be nice to have an OO interface that remembers what you want to do .. something like:

  use Data::Dumper::Simple;
  
  my $Dump => new  Data::Dumper::Simple(
                    Output=>"warn", # or "print"
                    # or: Output=\&CodeRef
                    vars=($this,%that,@other)
                    };

 $Dump->() ; # Can't think of appropriate syntax here.. 
 # Line above would do the equivalent of
 print Dumper ($$this,%that,@other);
 
 # If we no longer want to output %that, do
 $Dump->Removevars(%that);
 # or even
 $Dump->Addvars(@Something_Else);

[Ovid]

There was one additional nit - which perhaps you can pick -the need to say "print Dumper (\$blah)" - why keep repeating the "print" or "warn" .. wouldn't is be nice to have an OO interface that remembers what you want to do.

The latest version of Data::Dumper::Simple supports this.

use Data::Dumper::Simple autowarn => 1;
Dumper($scalar, @array, %hash);

Or if you'd rather carp and you're already using a sub named Dumper:

use Data::Dumper::Simple as => 'show', autowarn => 'carp';
show($scalar, %hash);

There's not much of a savings if you're doing this just once, but if you are doing a lot of debugging, it can save quite a bit of time.