because (most) objects are just blessed hashes

True. Although, as you pointed out, technically not always. As for the classes these objects are blessed with... You can bless a thing with a non-existant class, rewrite the class later on the fly and you are still good.

use strict; use warnings; use Data::Dumper; # Turn stuff into blessed objects my $foo = 'THIS IS A SCALAR'; my $bar = [qw(THIS IS AN ARRAY)]; my $baz = {'This' => 'Is', 'A' => 'Hash'}; # Bless them with a class that doesn't technically exist yet (and have + Perl autovivify it for us) my $scalarobject = bless \$foo, 'This::Is::A::Dummy::Object'; my $arrayobject = bless $bar, 'This::Is::A::Dummy::Object'; my $hashobject = bless $baz, 'This::Is::A::Dummy::Object'; { # Force the This::Is::A::Dummy::Object class to have a print metho +d that stringifies its own object ;-) no strict 'refs'; *{'This::Is::A::Dummy::Object::stringify'} = sub{ my ($self) = @_; + print Dumper($self); }; } $scalarobject->stringify(); $arrayobject->stringify(); $hashobject->stringify();

Result:

$VAR1 = bless( do{\(my $o = 'THIS IS A SCALAR')}, 'This::Is::A::Dummy: +:Object' ); $VAR1 = bless( [ 'THIS', 'IS', 'AN', 'ARRAY' ], 'This::Is::A::Dummy::Object' ); $VAR1 = bless( { 'This' => 'Is', 'A' => 'Hash' }, 'This::Is::A::Dummy::Object' );

I love that you can do stuff like this. Not usually for production code. Although, come to think of it, it might come in handy for that "rewrite my XML config parser" thing i have had on my todo list for a decade now...

PerlMonks XP is useless? Not anymore: XPD - Do more with your PerlMonks XP

In reply to Re^8: Aren't there code refs as well as function refs? (Update: refactoring many variables into hash or object) by cavac
in thread Aren't there code refs as well as function refs? by dd-b

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.