Your problem is that you don't have methods, you just have plain vanilla subroutines which don't interact with inheritance at all. If you want inheritance you need to establish a subclass relationship using @ISA and actually make method calls. See perlboot, perltoot, and perltooc (and probably perlbot too, just for good measure).

For that to work, sub identify must be written differently, as a class method:

package MyParent;

sub identify {
    return $_[0]->name;
};

sub name {
    return 'MyParent'; # or alternatively,
    return ref $_[0] || $_[0]
};

package Child;
use parent -norequire => 'MyParent';

sub name {
    return 'Child'; # or alternatively,
    return ref $_[0] || $_[0]
};
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Update: Also set up inheritance between Child and MyParent.

Let me clarify my omissions from my prevous post. Here's what I have at the present time:

package Parent;

sub identify { return name(); }

sub name { return 'Parent'; }

1;

package Child;

use Parent;

@ISA = qw(Parent);

sub name { return 'Child'; }

1
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Parent::identify returns 'Parent' Child::identifiy returns nothing Parent::identify() returns 'Parent' Child::identify() generates an error (undefined subroutine)

"You can't get there from here".

Unless you use "object notation", and call your methods with a class or object instance, no inheritance will work.

You could fake the stuff you want by trying AUTOLOAD trickery but down that road lies so much sorrow I won't even tell you how to do it.

So you'll have to change Parent and Child in the way I outlined above.