Thanks ncw. I had thought of an arrangement like the one above. I think the code design could be considered to cleaner, but here's what bothers me about it:

One programming principle is "optimizing for the common case". The common case here is that I create a new "err" call in a script, as above. If I switch the OO style, instead of writing out 'err' each time, I'm now writing out '$err->err', so the solution makes more work in the common case.

What about the magic that CGI.pm uses, where you can call routines with an OO style, or with a procedural style, and you don't even have to start with "new CGI", because there's a default object created. Can someone explain that?

As far as fetching the caller's package, perl makes that easy: $callers_pkg = caller;

I did end up using that in an inbetween module once, with the logic of "If my caller's package has defaults use those, otherwise use the defaults in CGI::Err". It worked, but that didn't seem clean either...

Thanks for any further comment. -mark

In reply to OO vs. procedural style by markjugg
in thread Handling cascading defaults by markjugg

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