Apparently the author is not familiar with this idiom, though it's pretty common.
He does say
Sure, one could pass a reference to a hash with these key
value pairs, and then decode the hash inside the subroutine. Again, this is
asking the programmer to do what the language should intrinsically understand:
in essence, to code around the language.
I missed this the first time I read the article. I'm kind
of ambivalent about this way of thinking. I accept the
argument as valid, but on the other hand it's not a whole
lot of overhead (read: not much syntactic sugar required).
The cookbook shows a number of compact techniques for doing this.
Although when writing OO Perl, it really is a drag to have to write
my $self = shift every single time.
What I have noticed with Perl is that I figure out
very few tricks myself from first principles. Just about all
of my mastery has come from reading books and other people's
code. The only other language that I have observed this is C++.
If you haven't read the Gang of Four book, and studied how
the STL works, you'll only ever skim the surface.
--
g r i n d e r
