I know that you've beta tested it and everything, but this screams for object-oriented programming. In fact, what you've done is kind of a reimplementation of some of Perl's OO features. :)

It would be easier to make auto- or self-loading if you could make a class called Screens, then create a method called main, a method called foo, etc. Then you could move them down after __DATA__, and could therefore use the SelfLoader or AutoLoader. See perlman:perltoot for how to do this.

Once you'd changed to OO syntax, your way of calling this functionality could be: 

my $screen_maker = ScreenMaker->new();
$screen_maker->$current_screen();

[download]

For backwards compatibility, your &screens function could write stub routines to access the screens, like so: 

use ScreenMaker;
use Carp qw(carp);

sub screens {
    carp "Using deprecated '&screens' function";
    my $screen_maker = ScreenMaker->new();
    %screens = (
        main => sub { $screen_maker->main() },
        foo -> sub { $screen_maker->foo() },
    };
}

[download]

That way, currently-running code will still work, but will generate warnings that allow you to transform to OO methods.

stephen

In reply to Re: selfloader and anonymous subroutines by stephen
in thread selfloader and anonymous subroutines by Anonymous Monk

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