One of the old/popular tricks in UN*X world is using single binary for multiple commands, for example 
gzip file # compress file
gunzip file # decompress file
diff `which gzip` `which gunzip` #NONE!

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Now, here's the problem I've got: I'm writing a simple library, which should provide two methods, get and slurp, usage scenario looks like this: 

$rv=$sth->get("var");
$value=$sth->slurp("var");

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Now, the problem at hand is those methods are almost completely identical, they differ in only ~2 lines ( while being ~50 lines long, and expected to grow to ~1k lines ).

Normally I would go with something like this: 

sub slurp {
     my ($self,$stuff)=@_;
     $self->get($stuff,"SLURP");
}
sub get {
#.....
        if ($slurp) { 
# difference..
        } else {
#...
        }
}

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but what when you've got arrays as arguments?

So, I figured I'd use AUTOLOAD... but - first, I don't know how, and second - I'm not really sure if that's the best route... it looks like with AUTOLOAD it's all getting messy...

What do monks think?

In reply to Should one treat method name as input? by Eyck

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