Re^2: Technique for building arguments from function name?

Ah, yes, the old AUTOLOAD. You have proven, once again, that you have forgotten more Perl than I have even remembered. What are the downsides of doing this? I was toying with the idea of generating HTML code like this:

add_h1('Title');
add_p('Here is the opening paragraph.')
[download]

What is this technique called? There must be a name for it.

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Re^3: Technique for building arguments from function name? by shmem (Chancellor) on Dec 04, 2017 at 21:38 UTC
What is this technique called? There must be a name for it. Well, this technique resembles what the ol' CGI.pm was doing in its days. I would say that it is against the DRY principle in software development - Don't Repeat Yourself - so whilst it might have a name, it surely is not a flattering one. Writing `add_h1('Title'); add_p('Here is the opening paragraph.')` [download] requires two functions, while writing `add('h1','Title'); add('p','Here is the opening paragraph.');` [download] requires only one, which means less code and a smaller memory footprint, at the expense of typing 2 more chars in the source for every call (`''` against `_`). So, having a function for every tag is overkill, as haukex correctly points out. There are plenty of ways of generating HTML code in a more flexible way, e.g. Mason (before and after going the Moose way), Template::Toolkit and other templating solutions. For more overkill, but with the benefit of writing HTML in a perlish way, see Re: Perl module for RELAX NG? (shameless plug) which converts every tag of a DTD to its function, which takes a block as first argument. I use it only to write templates to be processed by a templating engine, since it is pretty slow. See also Which internal DSL are there in Perl? (Domain Specific Languages - Part 1). perl -le'print map{pack c,($-++?1:13)+ord}split//,ESEL'	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Technique for building arguments from function name? by LanX (Saint) on Dec 04, 2017 at 20:55 UTC
> I was toying with the idea of generating HTML code ... You might be interested to look into CGI::HTML::Functions > What is this technique called? Kind of Currying, but that's not necessarily implemented with AUTOLOAD. update Or rather Partial application Cheers Rolf _{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :) Wikisyntax for the Monastery}	[reply]
Re^4: Technique for building arguments from function name? by haukex (Archbishop) on Dec 05, 2017 at 06:16 UTC
You might be interested to look into CGI::HTML::Functions Good point! Quoting that doc: If you really want to continue using the HTML generation functionality of CGI.pm then you should take a look at HTML::Tiny instead, which may give you a migration path away from CGI.pm's html generation functions; i strongly encourage you to move towards template driven page generation for anything involving markup as it will make porting your app to other frameworks much easier in the long run. And CGI::Alternatives mentions, among several others, Template::Toolkit.	[reply]
Re^5: Technique for building arguments from function name? by LanX (Saint) on Dec 06, 2017 at 16:04 UTC
Lee is not a fan of the module he volunteered to maintain. On a side note: The monastery's engine heavily relies on those HTML generation functions from CGI.pm! Cheers Rolf _{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :) Wikisyntax for the Monastery}	[reply]

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