SUPER:: is broken in Perl

Check out SUPER, it might help you there ;)

you can't tell a method from a subroutine

Yeah I agree that is annoying too, however it is possible to get some stuff. For instance, in Moose we differentiate between exported subs from another package and subs defined in that package. Then there is also stuff like MooseX::Method which make it easier to "tag" methods and therefore tell them apart.

But yeah in the end I will agree there are some broken parts to Perl 5 OO model, but the fact that I can fix most of them and provide a decent hack to work around or at least minimize the others is a pretty good. Try that in Java/C#/etc.

For your own code you can use attributes (experimental feature) to signal what's a method and what's not.

sub foo :method {
  my $self = shift;

  # ...

  return;
}

sub bar {
  # ...

  return;
}

use attributes;
sub is_a_method {
  scalar grep $_ eq 'method', attributes::get($_[0]);
}

for ([ foo => \&foo ], [ bar => \&bar ]) {
  print "$_->[0] is a " . (is_a_method($_->[1]) ? 'method' : 'function
+') . "\n";
}

__END__
foo is a method
bar is a function
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lodin