Hi docdurdee,

Essentially, you have classes Widget and WidgetContainer, and you want each Widget object to know which WidgetContainer object happens to contain it.

This sort of design, built around circular dependencies, is a recognised anti-pattern — and therefore a bad idea! Of course, it is possible to do this (Perl gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself), but it’s almost certainly an indication of a poor design — probably an XY Problem. Why do you (think you) want your Bar objects to know which Foo objects contain them?

If you do really need to do this, I would be looking at storing the information you need in a hash, making that hash a class variable in package Foo, and providing Foo class methods which Bar objects can use to interrogate the hash. This will at least remove the circularity inherent in your proposed design.

Hope that helps,

Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,

In reply to Re: Arrays of circular memory references by Athanasius
in thread Arrays of circular memory references by docdurdee

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