I don't see how the logic you would implement to keep someone from calling the "win" subroutine without being a winner would be any different in a hash than it would be in the subroutine where the winning actually happens.

Symrefs are much like using global variables. In both cases, the fundamental problem is there's just one symbol table for "everything". You can of course use packages to separate things from one another (and should, if you want to use symrefs), but packages share the same problem symrefs have: package names are global variables... and for them, there's absolutely no way to separate them from one another.

At the end of the day, just like for global variables, it boils down to avoiding them wherever they're not unavoidable. If something doesn't take a disproportionate amount of effort to do with a different method, then it shouldn't be done with symrefs.

In this case, symrefs and a dispatch hash work equally well. Just because of that, you should habitually use the dispatch hash. Could you logically argue that a 10 line script (and I don't mean illegibly compressed code) must be written under strict? Unlikely. Would you do it anyway? Most likely. It's just the same here.

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re^7: Naming Subs by Aristotle
in thread Naming Subs by eoin

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