It seems you and dws have worked out your design issues but I felt like throwing a comment or two. :-)

First off, i'm not the hugest fan of named parameters. I agree they are useful when you have a lot of items to pass around, or when you are generating code from a DB or the like, but I find I reuse mostly code that has simple and easy to understand semantics. Usually that means only a few arguments. But sometimes it means being a bit more creative like this 

sub new {
   my $class=shift;
   my $id;
   if (@_ % 2) {
      $id=shift;
   }
   my %args=@_;
   #....
}

[download]
You see what I mean? We can use both positional and named parameters in the same call, so long as you put the positional item first and shift them off before you assign to the %hash. Now we can say 
  my $foo=Foo->new(100);
  my $foo=Foo->new(100,%ARGS);
  my $bar=Bar->new(%ARGS);
  my $bar=Bar->new();

[download]
You can extend this idea to more arguments, but you have to be careful how you do it. For a single argument however it works fine. You can also play other games, for instance checking type. Many subs we commonly use do basic type checking on their arguments to provide a natural feel, but also a fine level of control. File::Find is a good example. Personally I think that a bit of extra work setting up an intuitive interface saves a lot of hassle later.

cheers, :-)

--- demerphq
my friends call me, usually because I'm late....

In reply to Re: Overloading inherited class methods by demerphq
in thread Overloading inherited class methods by Ovid

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.