Others have already commented on your example data, so I'll limit myself to some thoughts on your "good practice" question.

Your idea to break up a method into several smaller ones, each with a distinct task, is good practice. It encourages subclassing by making it easier to override very specific pieces of behavior. Now, whether you'd be able to get this particular refactoring accepted into Tie::File is another problem altogether, but the idea is sound :-)

So you're definitely on the right track. It's a shame you then cave in to "premature optimization". Thinking one additional method call would ruin performance is, IMHO, misguided. I don't have a benchmark handy, but I wouldn't be surprised if Perl's built-in method dispatching would be just as fast as your caller package check (what with the regular expression and all). Besides, the overhead of one method call will likely be swamped by the IO calls (not to mention the tie interface itself).

The way you think to solve the issue has its problems too:

  1. You break inheritance with the check on the object's class name: with your code, it's now impossible to subclass that particular method and benefit from its features
  2. You now have code duplication: the code in the else() branch belongs in the superclass, not here

Side note: a better way to get the object's class name would be my $pkg = ref $self;. But you should almost never do that: it's usually much better to verify what an object can do than what class it is.

In reply to Re: RFC:Hacking Tie::File to read complex data by rhesa
in thread RFC:Hacking Tie::File to read complex data by citromatik

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