I've been thinking a bit more about constructors and the fact that being able to do Class->new(file => 'blah') is a really handy thing to do. And then I thought about Perl's diverse object representation model. So, here's the base class 'new' I'm thinking of moving to. Note that it's representation independent and, because I did the 'composed method' thing, it's easy to override small parts of the implementation.
sub new {
my $proto = shift;
return $proto->new_with_args(@_) if @_;
$proto->make_a_new_one->init;
}
sub make_a_new_one {
my $proto = shift;
bless {}, ref($proto) || $proto;
}
Note that, if you have an object that's better represented as an arrayref, say, just do
sub new_with_args {
$self->throw(Exception->new("Can't handle args"))
}
sub init { }
sub make_a_new_one {
my $proto = shift;
bless [], ref($proto) || $proto;
}
And it will Just Work.
And yes, I *know* it looks like an awful lot of work just to make an object, but it's all about the intent baby.
