NB: All examples below are simplified for instructional purposes.
On Methods
Yes, you are correct. The first argument to your new function, if invoked as a method, will be the thing you invoked it against.
There are two “flavors” of invoking a method, but the result is the same either way. One flavor relies upon an operator, the binary -> operator. The other flavor relies on ordering of arguments, the way bitransitive verbs work in English. Most people use the dative/bitransitive style only with built-ins — and perhaps with constructors, but seldom anything else.
Under most (but not quite all) circumstances, these first two are equivalent:
1. Dative Invocation of Methods
This is the positional one, the one that uses word-order to determine what’s going on.
use Some::Package;
my $obj1 = new Some::Package NAME => "fred";
Notice we use no method arrow there: there is no -> as written. This is what Perl itself uses with many of its own functions, like
printf STDERR "%-20s: %5d\n", $name, $number;
Which just about everyone prefers to the equivalent:
STDERR->printf("%-20s: %5d\n", $name, $number);
However, these days that sort of dative invocation is used almost exclusively for built-ins, because people keep getting things confused.
2. Arrow Invocation of Methods
The arrow invocation is for the most part clearer and cleaner, and less likely to get you tangled up in the weeds of Perl parsing oddities. Note I said less likely; I did not say that it was free of all infelicities. But let’s just pretend so for the purposes of this answer.
use Some::Package;
my $obj2 = Some::Package->new(NAME => "fred");
At run time, barring any fancy oddities or inheritance matters, the actual function call would be
Some::Package::new("Some::Package", "NAME", "fred");
For example, if you were in the Perl debugger and did a stack dump, it would have something like the previous line in its call chain.
Since invoking a method always prefixes the parameter list with invocant, all functions that will be invoked as methods must account for that “extra” first argument. This is very easily done:
package Some::Package;
sub new {
my($classname, @arguments) = @_;
my $obj = { @arguments };
bless $obj, $classname;
return $obj;
}
This is just an extremely simplified example of the new most frequent ways to call constructors, and what happens on the inside. In actual production code, the constructor would be much more careful.
Methods and Indirection
Sometimes you don’t know the class name or the method name at compile time, so you need to use a variable to hold one or the other, or both. Indirection in programming is something different from indirect objects in natural language. Indirection just means you have a variable that contains something else, so you use the variable to get at its contents.
print 3.14; # print a number directly
$var = 3.14; # or indirectly
print $var;
We can use variables to hold other things involved in method invocation that merely the method’s arguments.
3. Arrow Invocation with Indirected Method Name:
If you don’t know the method name, then you can put its name in a variable. Only try this with arrow invocation, not with dative invocation.
use Some::Package;
my $action = (rand(2) < 1) ? "new" : "old";
my $obj = Some::Package->$action(NAME => "fido");
Here the method name itself is unknown until run-time.
4. Arrow Invocation with Indirected Class Name:
Here we use a variable to contain the name of the class we want to use.
my $class = (rand(2) < 1)
? "Fancy::Class"
: "Simple::Class";
my $obj3 = $class->new(NAME => "fred");
Now we randomly pick one class or another.
You can actually use dative invocation this way, too:
my $obj3 = new $class NAME => "fred";
But that isn’t usually done with user methods. It does sometimes happen with built-ins, though.
my $fh = ($error_count == 0) ? *STDOUT : *STDERR;
printf $fh "Error count: %d.\n", $error_count;
That’s because trying to use an expression in the dative slot isn’t going to work in general without a block around it; it can otherwise only be a simple scalar variable, not even a single element from an array or hash.
printf { ($error_count == 0) ? *STDOUT : *STDERR } "Error count: %d.\n", $error_count;
Or more simply:
print { $fh{$filename} } "Some data.\n";
Which is pretty darned ugly.
Let the invoker beware
Note that this doesn’t work perfectly. A literal in the dative object slot works differently than a variable does there. For example, with literal filehandles:
print STDERR;
means
print STDERR $_;
but if you use indirect filehandles, like this:
print $fh;
That actually means
print STDOUT $fh;
which is unlikely to mean what you wanted, which was probably this:
print $fh $_;
aka
$fh->print($_);
Advanced Usage: Dual-Nature Methods
The thing about the method invocation arrow -> is that it is agnostic about whether its left-hand operand is a string representing a class name or a blessed reference representing an object instance.
Of course, nothing formally requires that $class contain a package name. It may be either, and if so, it is up to the method itself to do the right thing.
use Some::Class;
my $class = "Some::Class";
my $obj = $class->new(NAME => "Orlando");
my $invocant = (rand(2) < 1) ? $class : $obj;
$invocant->any_debug(1);
That requires a pretty fancy any_debug method, one that does something different depending on whether its invocant was blessed or not:
package Some::Class;
use Scalar::Util qw(blessed);
sub new {
my($classname, @arguments) = @_;
my $obj = { @arguments };
bless $obj, $classname;
return $obj;
}
sub any_debug {
my($invocant, $value) = @_;
if (blessed($invocant)) {
$invocant->obj_debug($value);
} else {
$invocant->class_debug($value);
}
}
sub obj_debug {
my($self, $value) = @_;
$self->{DEBUG} = $value;
}
my $Global_Debug;
sub class_debug {
my($classname, $value) = @_;
$Global_Debug = $value;
}
However, this is a rather advanced and subtle technique, one applicable in only a few uncommon situations. It is not recommended for most situations, as it can be confusing if not handled properly — and perhaps even if it is.
