it was doubly important in Perl as it's so easy to accidentally step on the "private" methods of a class:

In the case you present, I would argue that if the base methods are truly private, they should have been implemented as lexically scoped closures (declare my $init = sub { }; at the top of the package), not as a regular subroutine.

It'd be nice if we could do away with the _subroutine_name idiom all together, but Perl doesn't currently provide a way to do protected methods (except by doing some fooling around with caller and isa, and even then it's only a runtime error), so the leading-underscore trick is the next best option.

Since we have a trick for doing truly private functions (with closures), I consider any class that implements private method with a leading underscore to be broken. If it's a protected method, it should be documented for the benifit of subclasses (away from the public interface documentation, please).

----
I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

: () { :|:& };:

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

In reply to Re: Re: Real live usage of inheritance? by hardburn
in thread Real live usage of inheritance? by BUU

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