Read the description of the Builder Pattern in the Design Patterns book. This should do what you want.

Basically:

• Each Matrix HAS-A CellRenderer (the Builder object)
• There is an abstract CellRenderer class that defines the interface: render_scalar(), render_link(), render_percentage() ...
• Concrete CellRenderer classes like HTMLCellRenderer, ExcelCellRenderer, etc., implement the interface of the CellRenderer class.
• Now you can configure a Matrix with a CellRenderer for the appropriate output type.
• The Matrix knows which of the CellRenderer interface operations to call for which type of cell item (switch statement).

Alternatively, and much cooler, you can solve this problem in the CLOS (Common Lisp Object System) way by using Damian Conway's module Class::Multimethod. This module allows you to have dynamic dispatching based on the type of multiple arguments.

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com

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