AlphaWolf has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello monkers!

given a package with a constructor, is there a way to autoload the object itself to return a given value/subroutine value? i tried something like this: 

package MyPackgage;
sub new {
my $this = shift;
my $class = ref($this) || $this;
my $self = {};
bless $self, $class;
return $self;
}

sub AUTOLOAD {
my $self = shift;
return "ook?";
}

[download]
my goal is that if i $object = MyPackage->new(); then i can do print $object
and the returned value will be from whatever i autoloaded...

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Anonymous Autoloading with OOP?
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Oct 12, 2008 at 19:37 UTC
    I think you're asking how to overload stringification. 
    use strict;
use warnings;

BEGIN {
   package MyPackage;

   use overload '""' => \&to_string;

   sub new {
      my $this = shift;
      my $class = ref($this) || $this;
      return bless {}, $class;
   }

   sub to_string {
      my ($self) = @_;
      return "ook?";
   }
}

my $object = MyPackage->new();
print($object, "\n");           # ook?

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
Re: Anonymous Autoloading with OOP?
by Corion (Patriarch) on Oct 12, 2008 at 19:31 UTC

    All "methods" are called with the object as the first parameter:

    use Data::Dumper;
...
sub AUTOLOAD {
    my $self = shift;
    warn $AUTOLOAD;
    warn Dumper \$self;    
};

    [download]

    I didn't read the question completely - ikegami's reply is far more on the spot

[reply]
[d/l]

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