Right, sorry..

I'm doing some Cat stuff and using Authen::Simple for authentication. My Cat instance has a Log::Dispatch logger which has methods like 'error','warning','debug' etc... Authen::Simple objects can take a logging object too, but it has to provide 'debug','info','warn' and 'error'. Log::Dispatch provides 'warning' but not 'warn'. To work around this, I made my own class which I called Log::Dispatch::Warn, which is a subclass of Log::Dispatch with a 'warn' sub which just calls 'warning'.

It seems kind of silly to create a whole module just to make an object call $self->warning(@_) if someone calls $object->warn($blah).

First, I thought of something like this:

*Log::Dispatch::warn = *Log::Dispatch::warning;

But I thought, that it doesn't look nice ;) so I changed it to:

*Log::Dispatch::warn = \&Log::Dispatch::warning;

But both threw warnings that Log::Dispatch::warn is "used only once: possible typo..."; And then, based upon the answers from morgon and mr_mischief I thought of

sub Log::Dispatch::warn {
  my $self = shift;
  $self->warning(@_);
}
[download]

tested with:

#!/usr/bin/perl -l
use strict;
use warnings;

package foo;

sub new {
    bless {}, shift();
}

sub foo {
    my $self = shift;
    print "hello @_";
}

package main;

sub foo::bar {
    my ( $self ) = shift;
    $self->foo(@_);
}

*foo::baz  = \&foo::foo;
*foo::buzz = *foo::foo;

my $o = foo->new();

$o->bar('world');
$o->baz('world');
$o->buzz('world');

__END__
[download]

But both threw warnings that Log::Dispatch::warn is "used only once: possible typo...";

And both are the Right Way to alias a function. Warnings are hints, not laws.

It'd be interesting to hear from autarch himself why 'warn' wasn't added to the list of valid methods of Log::Dispatch when various other abbreviations like 'err' and 'crit' and 'emer' have been. Maybe he is just waiting to hear from someone like you? :)