my 'toolchest' of things be put into a 'normal' module and be imported into the OO module

Your toolchest doesn't necessarily have to be a procedural ("normal") module, it too can be object oriented. diotalevi is only suggesting that the relationship between your toolchest module and your application module doesn't appear to be one where inheritance is appropriate.

Inheritance is for when one thing is another thing, where as delegation is when one thing has another thing. These are commonly refered to as is-a and has-a relationships. This is why inheritance in Perl is done through the @ISA array. Delegation in Perl can be accomplished simply by storing one object as an attribute in another object, and calling the first object's methods as appropriate.

To further reinforce the point, consider describing your situation in these terms. Does it make more sense to say "my application is a toolbox" or "my application has a toolbox"? Compare to a frequent example where inheritance is used: "this cat is a mammal" vs "this cat has a mammal." That should help you decide which is appropriate.

In reply to Re^3: Help me understand inheritance please! by revdiablo
in thread Help me understand inheritance please! by jdtoronto

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.