Re: constant name in variable

Thanks for all the suggestions. I believe i have a working version. This is for part of a name string analyzer. Here is exactly what im doing:

use strict;
use Carp;
use constant    {
    PREFIX      =>  1,
    SUFFIX      =>  2,
    TRUST       =>  3,
    DATE        =>  4,
    BUSINESS    =>  5,
};

sub AUTOLOAD {
    my $self = shift @_;
    my $method = $AUTOLOAD;
    $method =~ s/.*:://;
    return if $method eq "DESTROY";

    if ( $method !~ m/^Is(.+)$/ ) {
        confess "method = $method is not supported by AUTOLOAD!\n";
    }
    my $token_type_value = eval( uc($1) );
    if ( $@ ) {
        confess "invalid token type $1!\n";
    }

    my ($token) = @_;
    return $self->_IsToken($token, $token_type_value);
}
[download]

then i can make method calls like:

$analyzer->IsSuffix("PhD");
[download]

And _IsToken() does various tests, mostly against a list of known identifiers to determine if the token is of the type being asked about.

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Re: Re: constant name in variable by rir (Vicar) on Dec 02, 2002 at 22:01 UTC
This seems like heavy sugar to avoid calling `$analyzer->_IsToken()` directly. Other than a preference for: `$object->IsSuffix( "PhD");` [download] over `$object->Is( SUFFIX, "PhD");` [download] I'm not seeing any reason to do this. Preference is a sufficient reason. Am I missing something?	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: Re: constant name in variable by shemp (Deacon) on Dec 02, 2002 at 22:16 UTC
Preference is actually the main reason I've done it this way. It also allows an easy way to write an explicit IsSuffix(), to perform differently than what _IsToken(SUFFIX, ...) might do, if i need to create more in-depth analyzers than the trivial hash lookups that _IsToken() will be doing. That isn't a particularly great reason to do it this way though. I think i like practicing writing weird AUTOLOAD methods also, after having coded C++ for a number of years, which was much more annoying :) I am going to consider redesigning though.	[reply]