Re^6: Removing AUTOLOAD from CGI.pm (flexibility?)

[LanX]

> it was future proofed! You could call CGI->wibble and get a <wibble> tag.

I wasn't able to reproduce this without explicitly importing "wibble"

  DB<100> use CGI qw(:all wibble)

  DB<101> wibble
 => "<wibble />"

but

  DB<100> use CGI ':all'

  DB<101> $x=CGI->new()

  DB<102> $x->wibble()
Undefined subroutine CGI::wibble
 at (eval 24)[multi_perl5db.pl:644] line 2

So autoloading makes not much sense in this case.

It doesn't make the code more flexible it only delays the installation, which could already happen in the importer.

[leej]

You had to use :any to get this behaviour:

$ pmvers CGI
3.59
$ perl -E 'use CGI qw/:any/; say CGI->new->wibble({foo=>"bar"},"baz")'
<wibble foo="bar">baz</wibble>

[LanX]

> You had to use :any to get this behaviour:

Didn't see this, because :any is not documented in CGI , though -any is as a "pragma" (and mentioned in your blog-post)

There is also a mention of -compile , which means AUTOLOAD isn't needed to create the HTML-DSL.

IOW you could¹ get rid of AUTOLOAD without deprecating HTML-subs, just by making -compile the default.

But if you meant to deprecate the -autoload pragma, this seems to be a good idea.

Installing an AUTOLOAD into the importing namespace sounds like a very hazardous hack.

¹) I don't say "should" :)

update

After reading your blog-post again (>4th time) I'm puzzled. You only say you are disabling AUTOLOAD but not that you are deprecating precompiled HTML-subs in general.

Did I misunderstand you? Maybe you could clarify.

[leej]

> After reading your blog-post again (>4th time) I'm puzzled. You only say you are disabling AUTOLOAD but not that you are deprecating precompiled HTML-subs in general. Did I misunderstand you? Maybe you could clarify.

That's correct. AUTOLOAD is gone but the HTML generation functions remain. I had to add/tweak the code to generate the HTML functions. It cleans up the code hugely.

Here's the relevant commit. It's rather large so github doesn't show the full delta. There are a few other related commits later on, they all have #162 in the commit message.