I've read that post, and that's why I said I would like to hear merlyn's thoughts. Basically, that post says the same thing I just said: You shouldn't ever need to call the new method on an instance.

However, that doesn't mean that as the designer of a class, you can't provide the proper instructions to prevent an error when someone ELSE calls new on an object they got from your class, be it intentional or otherwise.

Personally, I consider the following two statements to be equally as ridiculous:

Don't use ref($proto) because users of your module/class should never call a constructor on an instance.

Don't check to make sure open() succeeded because a user should always make sure they're running your program with the proper permissions to open a file.

Either way, you're depending on someone else not to break your code, and that can't be good.

In reply to Re: (jeffa) 5Re: My first stab at OO perl... by Theseus
in thread My first stab at OO perl... by Theseus

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