in reply to Safer monkey-patching

The big problem with monkey patching is that no two modules can safely monkey-patch the same third module. Recently there was a rather drastic example in the Ruby community when two large libraries or frameworks added incompatible json methods to Class (or was it Object? dunno...), and that meant you couldn't use these two libraries in the same process.

Your approach doesn't solve this problem. And it can't, because it's not reasonably solvable.

I might add that source filters suffer from the same problem as monkey patching: you can't combine two source filters fiddling with the same piece of syntax.

Perl 6 - second systems done right

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Re^2: Safer monkey-patching
by tobyink (Canon) on Jan 19, 2012 at 09:18 UTC

    Indeed, this problem is not really solvable. However, my solution does offer a partial way forward.

    Let's imagine that My::AwesomeError and Your::GroovyError both superclass Example::Error, and both add an asplode method.

    We can then do:

    my $err = Example::Error->new('Heat death of universe detected!');
$err->My::AwesomeError::asplode();
$err->Your::GroovyError::asplode();
$err->asplode();  # Russian roulette

    [download]

    With true monkey patching, where My::AwesomeError and Your::GroovyError each defined the asplode method directly in the Example::Error namespace, we wouldn't get the option to do the above.

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      We can then do: 
      my $err = Example::Error->new('Heat death of universe detected!');
$err->My::AwesomeError::asplode(); $err->Your::GroovyError::asplode();
$err->asplode(); # Russian roulette

      [download]

      Of course you can, but it's not really a benefit. As you wrote in the OP, monkey patching is often done to work around limitations in existing code that you don't want to patch. But writing $obj->Class::method() requires the author of that code to be aware of the issue, and when he is, he can simply write Class::method($obj) without requiring any monkey patching.

      I do find your idea cute, but it really doesn't solve the "hard" problem, and the small problems it does solve seem to be either artifically constructed, or non-issues.

      Perl 6 - second systems done right
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