I agree with:

"My problem with smartmatch is that it tries to replace several more explicit constructs. I prefer to just use the more explicit one, leaving less to heuristics."

... in most cases. Don't use ~~ when ==, eq or =~ would do a better job.

However, there is one place I really miss smartmatch. Let's take for example RDF::RDB2RDF; you don't need to know all the details of what it does; suffice to say that it's got user-configurable objects which process a database. One of the options that can be configured is which tables (if any) should be skipped. I liked being able to say "set the ignore_tables option to anything that can be used as the right hand side of a smart match".

So if they wanted to skip one particular table, they could do ignore_tables => "foo", if they had a list of tables to skip, then ignore_tables => \@private, or they could use a regexp ignore_tables => qr{^priv}, or if they had more complex requirements, ignore_tables => sub {...}.

Smartmatch made implementing that really easy. And it's that aspect of smart match that made me want to write a stable replacement for it.

use Moops; class Cow :rw { has name => (default => 'Ermintrude') }; say Cow->new->name

In reply to Re^2: Smartmatch alternatives by tobyink
in thread Smartmatch alternatives by cavac

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.