The "easy" way to inflict much hard-to-debug trouble upon yourself is with a proxy object that acts like the real thing, but forwards everything to the "real" object. Your "master" object(s) only hand out proxies, and you can switch the master easily then:

# Untested code, not for production use
# see "hard-to-debug trouble"
package Proxy;
use strict;

use vars qw($AUTOLOAD);

sub AUTOLOAD {
  my $self = shift;
  $AUTOLOAD =~ m!::([^:]+)$!
    or die __PACKAGE__ . ": Weird method name $AUTOLOAD";
  my $method = $1;
  $self->()->$method(@_);
};

sub new {
  my ($package,$master) = @_;
  my $self = sub {
    my $s = shift;
    if (@_) {
      $master = shift;
    };
    $master;
  };
  bless $self, $package;
  $self;
};

[download]

This package fails to fake caller(), so debugging will get harder, and it doesn't respect/propagate list/scalar explicitly, which might have unfortunate results for your code too. Use it as follows:


package Master::Object;
sub new {
  my $package = shift;
  my $master = $package->create_a_new_object(@_);
  return Proxy->new($master);
};

...

my $main = Master::Object->new();


# set a new master object:
my $new_master = Master::Object->create_a_new_object();
$main->($new_master);

[download]

This is enough rope to hang yourself with. You should really rethink why you would want to do this ! :)

In reply to Re: Changing the target of refs of unknown type by Corion
in thread Changing the target of refs of unknown type by Irrelevant

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