To me, this looks like a dodgy cargo cult way of doing an ordered hash.

It is neither dogdy; nor cargo-cult; nor do they pre-date hashes. Both became available at exactly the same time with the advent of blessed references circa. 5.001.

The code is using a blessed array rather than a blessed hash as the basis of its objects. This is more compact and faster than the "normal" blessed hashes.

The constants give programmer-friendly names to the fields; whilst still allowing the field lookups to be optimally efficient.

For completeness, field lookup with a hash still requires an array lookup; but first the key (field name) has to be translated into an index number. And then, if you happen to be unlucky, there might need to be a linear search as well.

blessed arrays with named constant field indexes are a less used, but perfectly valid, highly functional and more efficient way of implementing objects in Perl.

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In reply to Re: Is this ancient perl or just a cargo cult? by BrowserUk
in thread Is this ancient perl or just a cargo cult? by nevdka

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