Brothers and Sisters in Perl,

I've discovered the magic of eval(), but I suspect TABWTDI (There's A Better Way To Do It). Behold my scary-but-cool perl module.

It works like this: when a new object is created, the user also specifies the attributes of the object. Cool, eh? The new() method dutifully then builds some eval() statements which automagically create a getter-setter method for each attribute, using that attribute's name as the method name. Scary, eh?

Y'all might have done this already, but it was a fun and startling revelation for me. 
package TEST;
use strict;

##############################################
#
#   A generic object with fields specified
#   at creation time.
#
##############################################

my %data;

sub new
{
   my $self = bless [], shift;
   my @required_fields = @_;

   foreach my $field (@required_fields)
   {
      chomp $field;
      my $eval = "sub $field : lvalue { \$data{+shift}->{$field}; }";
      eval $eval;
   }
   return $self;
}

sub DESTROY
{
   delete $data{+shift};
}

1;

[download]
I can now do neato things like this: 
my $test = new TEST qw( foo bar baz );

$test->foo = 3;
$test->bar = "Boy is this a messed-up object!";
$test->baz = "I bet someone else has a better way to do this.";

[download]
-Rob

In reply to Automagic subroutines by rje

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