This should be easy, but I don't remember seeing in the docs. What's the most elegant way of having methods support being called as both a package method and as a class/object method?

In a method without arguments, it's pretty easy since there will be either no argument, or the first argument (self) will be ignored: 

package MyPackage;

sub foo() { print 'stuff'; }

1;

MyPackage::foo();
MyPackage->foo();

[download]

However, when I go to add argument to foo(), I'm not quite sure what the safest way is to see how the method was called. 

package MyPackage;

sub foo() { 
     my $self = shift;
     my $text;

     if (ref($self) eq __PACKAGE__) {
         $text = shift;
     } else {
         $text = $self;
     };

     print $text;

};

1;

MyPackage::foo('stuff');
MyPackage->foo('stuff');

[download]

Now, checking the ref($self) works, but if I inherit and override this package, self could be many things.

I suspect there is some ->can, ->isa, and ref() magic involved, but I just haven't stumbled on it yet. I think the Digest::MD5 module works this way.

Yes, I know there are probably no good reasons to do this, other than some people like to use OOP, and some don't. I figure why not impliment both styles and let end users decide, and learn something new along the way.

-=Chris

In reply to Methods supporting both package and OOP style calls by jk2addict

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