In your argument there is a lot of assumed knowledge about the code. I hope you have great recall or don't need to maintain your code in a distant future.

In the below code $response->finish is not working correctly. It seems someone forgot to add code to register some action with the legacy system to the called finish method. Some client has expanded his use of the info generated and this is suddenly a noticed misfeature. As the newly hired Perl expert your assigned task is to fix the problem. 

# Mark the calling request object as answered, use the
# ID param to create and return an response packet object.
# Let the old system know this is done.
sub _respond {
    my ($self, $request, $id, $response ) = @_;

    my $response = $request->new;    ### Hey!!

    $request->count( $request->count + 1 );

    if ( $response->approved) {
        $response->requestor( $id);
        $response->finish( SUCCESS ); 
        $request->answered( $id)
        Request_handler->reap( $request->id());
        return $response;
    }
    $response->finish( FAIL);
    return;
}

[download]
There are 27 variations of the type Packet floating around the system. _respond is called from 19 different places all but 2 of which get $request or its forerunner passed in.

My point: Do your posited circumstances exist here?

The author who wrote the code knew. He knew that $_[1] would always be a Packet_Foreign here. He didn't care about truth or clarity so the find part of a find and fix problem now requires much more effort.

I am not a great typist so I like to avoid unnecessary typing but sacrificing information for the sake of fewer keystrokes is foolish.

In reply to (Re:)+ $class = ref $class || $class by rir
in thread Constructor/Factory Orthodoxy by mojotoad

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.