Many thanks for the thoughtful replies to my question. Successively, they pointed out that

  1. I was, as so often, missing the obvious by not sub-classing
  2. but that the creation of a new class implies, to me at least, a more stable setup than I wanted;
  3. but then that there's quite an easy way to change a class-wide method definition, which was good enough for me
  4. and that finally, there's a way of doing it the original way I had conceived anyway.

In the end, subclassing was easiest, and mostly fitted what I wanted to do. After all, it's a test script, which for me only needs to test elegant code, not be elegant code itself.

As an aside, the reason that I'd originally thought of approaching it by runtime method redefinition is probably a habit from Ruby (please don't curse me for mentioning it in this holy place). Ruby has a cute of way of doing this (and so, maybe will Perl6?):

class Dog
  def bark
    puts "woof"
  end
end

fido  = Dog.new()
rover = Dog.new()

class << rover
  def bark
    puts "meow"
  end
end

fido.bark() # woof!
rover.bark() # meow!

[download]

Once again, thanks for your replies

In reply to Re: changing object's methods at runtime by ViceRaid
in thread changing object's methods at runtime by ViceRaid

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.