One option would be a simplistic factory that held a single "shared thing", and was responsible for creating the other objects, so that they could have a reference to the shared thing without having to explicitly pass the "shared thing" around.
Something like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
package SharedThing;
sub new {
my $that = shift;
my $class = ref($that) || $that;
return bless {"counter" => 0}, ref($that) || $that;
}
sub hello {
my $this=shift;
$this->{counter}++;
printf "hello, count is [%d]\n",$this->{counter};
}
package MyFactory;
sub new {
my $that = shift;
my $class = ref($that) || $that;
my $this = {};
bless $this, $class;
$this->{sharedthing}=SharedThing->new();
return $this;
}
sub A {A->new(@_);}
sub B {B->new(@_);}
package A;
sub new {
my $that = shift;
my $class = ref($that) || $that;
my $this = {};
bless $this, $class;
$this->{factory}=shift;
# call the "hello" method of the "shared thing" so that
# we can see that it's indeed a single instance
$this->{factory}->{sharedthing}->hello();
return $this;
}
package B;
our @ISA=qw(A);
package main;
my $factory=MyFactory->new();
my $a1=$factory->A();
my $a2=$factory->A();
my $b1=$factory->B();
my $b2=$factory->B();
All of the instances of A and B have a reference to the factory passed to them when they are instantiated, and so, they can get to $this->{factory}->{sharedthing}...the single shared object.