Re^5: (How) Do you document/test your private subroutines?

> underscore _convention()

That's the problem. If the parent class defines _frobnicate but doesn't document it, you might accidentally define _frobnicate in the child class (because underscore convention!) to do something completely different, and kaboom!

($q=q:Sq=~/;[c](.)(.)/;chr(-||-|5+lengthSq)`"S|oS2"`map{chr |+ord
}map{substrSq`S_+|`|}3E|-|`7**2-3:)=~y+S|`+$1,++print+eval$q,q,a,
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Re^6: (How) Do you document/test your private subroutines? by tobyink (Canon) on Nov 13, 2018 at 19:02 UTC
Or worse still, you're writing a child class and carefully check that the parent class doesn't define `_frobnicate`; everything seems good. Then you install an upgrade of the parent class from CPAN, and it defines `_frobnicate`. If the updated parent class had made `frobnicate` a public method then the problem would be pretty easy to track down, maybe even by just reading the Changes file. If the updated parent class had used `my $_frobnicate = sub { ... };` this wouldn't be a problem to begin with. toby döt ink	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^6: (How) Do you document/test your private subroutines? (->can) by LanX (Saint) on Nov 12, 2018 at 17:41 UTC
> you might accidentally define _frobnicate in the child class ... and kaboom! for completeness, we might not get a "Subroutine _frobnicate redefined at" warning but it is possible to dynamically inspect a parent class with `->can` from `UNIVERSAL` So it's not that the "sub-class"-developer is completely in the dark. It should even be possible to check this automatically. (which is the saner approach since people don't tend to read the docs after a parent class got extended) Cheers Rolf _{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :) Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice}	[reply] [d/l]
Re^6: (How) Do you document/test your private subroutines? by LanX (Saint) on Nov 12, 2018 at 17:00 UTC
ahh ... I see. I think we have now three documentation levels to be distinguished: docs for the user of the module/class docs for the developer of subclasses docs for the maintainer Cheers Rolf _{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :) Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice}	[reply]