Brothers and Sisters in Perl,
I've discovered the magic of eval(), but I suspect TABWTDI (There's A Better Way To Do It). Behold my scary-but-cool perl module.
It works like this: when a new object is created, the user also specifies the attributes of the object. Cool, eh? The new() method dutifully then builds some eval() statements which automagically create a getter-setter method for each attribute, using that attribute's name as the method name. Scary, eh?
Y'all might have done this already, but it was a fun and startling revelation for me.
package TEST;
use strict;
##############################################
#
# A generic object with fields specified
# at creation time.
#
##############################################
my %data;
sub new
{
my $self = bless [], shift;
my @required_fields = @_;
foreach my $field (@required_fields)
{
chomp $field;
my $eval = "sub $field : lvalue { \$data{+shift}->{$field}; }";
eval $eval;
}
return $self;
}
sub DESTROY
{
delete $data{+shift};
}
1;
I can now do neato things like this:
my $test = new TEST qw( foo bar baz );
$test->foo = 3;
$test->bar = "Boy is this a messed-up object!";
$test->baz = "I bet someone else has a better way to do this.";
-Rob