Are you looking for Attribute::Handlers? I'm not sure I understand your question, but that's by far the easiest way to declare your own attributes.

I'm interested but I'm not sure what you're asking for. Can you elaborate? Also, I see you playing with prototypes alot these days. Have you read Tom Christiansen's FMTEYEWK Prototypes in Perl? In general it works out that prototypes just don't work for parameter validation. If you want that then you ought to check out Params::Validate and solve the problem the right way.

Seeking Green geeks in Minnesota

In this case I'm not really using the prototype. It's behaving more like a counter than anything else. I use the prototype function to read it and determine how many arguments to send... no more. The attribute I'm trying to set is to tell me weather or not the sub being delcared needs references instead of just data.



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My code doesn't have bugs, it just develops random features.

Flame ~ Lead Programmer: GMS (DOWN) | GMS (DOWN)

You are using subroutine prototypes to convey a count. Since you are looking up the prototype you must be building the argument list dynamically which means you are also bypassing the prototype (or using eval which is probably worse). So it seems you are misusing the prototype.

Now you want to put an attribute on the subroutine just so you can check for it. I think these both sound like you are fixated on using a specific channel for conveying information and you should consider alternatives.

You could convey the number of arguments by how many letters in the subroutine name and use uppercase if you want a reference and lower case if not. (just to give you an exagerated idea of how your current plan sounds to me)

Another alternative would be to have the subroutine return the meta information when you call it with no arguments:

    sub mysub {
        return -4   unless  @_;
        my( $svA, $svB, $svC, $svD )= @_;
        ...
    }
[download]

Good luck with your attributes problem. I did a quick look in perlsub which pointed to the documentation for attributes.pm which mentions doing custom attributes, so perhaps you should just go read that.

Thanks for the advice tye. The problem is, I don't actually call the sub by name, I work with references, many of which are anonymous to begin with (declared inline). This is suppost to be a part of the custom tests option mentioned here: Data Validation Tests



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My code doesn't have bugs, it just develops random features.

Flame ~ Lead Programmer: GMS (DOWN) | GMS (DOWN)

The "suggestion" on using subroutine name was facetious, meant to illustrate another example of an inappropriate channel.

                - tye