Inheritance in Perl is indeed clunkier to set up than in other languages. Is it worth it? That depends on what you're doing.
On to the particulars of your example:
In Noun::new(), you need to either defer blessing or re-bless after you've invoked SUPER::new(). Unless you do, Noun::new will return instances of Word. Not correct: see the post below.
A cleaner way is to separate "initialization" from creation.
package Word;
sub new {
my $pkg = shift;
my $self = bless {}, $pkg;
$self->initialize(@_);
$self;
}
sub initialize {
my $self = shift;
$self->{stem} = shift;
$self->{english} = shift;
}
package Noun;
use base qw(Word);
sub new {
my $pkg = shift;
bless {}, $pkg;
$self->initialize(@_);
$self;
}
sub initialize {
my $self = shift;
$self->SUPER::initialize(shift, shift);
$self->{gender} = shift;
$self->{nom_sg} = shift;
$self->{gen_sg} = shift;
}
This cleans things up, at the expense, arguably, of more "clunk". Then we have to add a bit more clunk to deal with
print $w->{english};
which commits the great OO sin of assuming private details of an object. The official way out of this is to add an "accessor" method to your base class.
sub english {
my $self = shift;
return $self->{english};
}
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.