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Non-orthogonality of Perl

When it comes to switching between objects and natives, Perl OO is not quite as orthogonal (or DWIM) as I would like. For instance, assuming I have a class:

package MyArray;

...

sub push { ...}

Then I can treat an instance of that object as an object with a method push, or as a kindof array (kindof, because of course an actual array would have @ for its sigil):

# these are equivalent:

$instance->push(1);

push $instance, 1;

I don't, however, have the orthogonal behaviour with an actual array ref:

# this works:

push @$arrayref, 1;

# this doesn't:

$arrayref->push(1);

# nor, of course, does this:

@$arrayref->push(1);

What I would like is more DWIM than real orthogonality, but if Perl's not DWIM then it's nothing! I guess I'm just wishing for real native array objects like Ruby (sigh).

01:54 PM, 25 Jun 2007 by Mark Aufflick Permalink | Short Link | Comments (3)

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