I've trawled through much of the Perl documentation looking for something that addresses exactly that issue and can't find anything. Pretty much all of the pertinent examples use scalar variables rather than member functions.

It is however a very useful technique to dispatch to members in the context of a parser. Decorate the verb to avoid the possibility of nefarious calling of unintended members (DESTROY in the document being parsed could otherwise be a little unfortunate) and you've got a very easily extensible interpreter for all sorts of stuff (see sub describeAtom in Updated QuickTime format movie file dumper for example).

It's probably better to use the function reference returned from can (see 'UNIVERSAL: The Root of All Objects' in perltoot) though (amazing what you learn by re-reading the docs;) ):

for (@mem) {
    next unless my $member = $obj->can ("_do_$_");
    $obj->$member ();
}

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DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

In reply to Re^3: Clean perl code (unused functions) by GrandFather
in thread Clean perl code (unused functions) by icanwin

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