I tend to use perl one-liners extensively, mostly for testing purposes. In particular, I often load a module with a loooooooooong name only to instantiate it once. And it's boooooooring to type the whole name twice.

So I came up with an idea of a one-liner shortener along the lines of:

perl -we 'use new qw(My::Very::Long::Module x foo 42); print $x->get_f
+oo;'
[download]

Which is a rough equivalent of

perl -we 'use My::Very::Long::Module; our $x = My::Very::Long::Module-
+>new( foo => 42 ); print $x->get_foo;'
[download]

And I have a proof-of-concept implementation that works as follows:

• require module being called;
• create a new instance;
• create a package variable in the calling package (so that strict doesn't complain);
• set that variable to instance from above.

Here it is.

package new;

use strict;
use warnings;

=head1 NAME

new - shorted require Foo; Foo->new(...) to just one call

=head1 SYNOPSYS

    use new qw(My::Very::Long::Module x foo 42);

is an exact equivalent of

    our $x;
    BEGIN {
        require My::Very::Long::Module;
        $x = My::Very::Long::Module->new( foo => 42 );
    };

or a rough equivalent of

    use My::Very::Long::Module;
    our $x = My::Very::Long::Module->new( foo => 42 );

Not a big deal in a real program, but may save some typing in a
one-liner test script.

Works well under C<use strict;>.

=cut

$Carp::Internal{ (__PACKAGE__) }++;

sub import {
    my ($self, $target, $name, @args) = @_;

    my $filename = $target;
    $filename =~ s#::#/#g;
    $filename .= ".pm";

    require $filename;
    my $obj = $target->new( @args );

    my $caller = caller;
    $name ||= 'new';
    my $sym = join "::", $caller, $name; 
    no strict qw(refs vars);
    *$sym = \$$sym;
    $$sym = $obj;
};

1;
[download]

Made purely for fun, but maybe there's some point in it after all.

UPDATE Available as gist.

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