adding methods to existing packages

[Michael Stillwell]

On 13 Jan 2006, at 02:29, Michel Rodriguez wrote:

> I don't know of anything that would help you directly, but you  
> could adapt XML::DOM::BagOfTricks (http://search.cpan.org/dist/XML- 
> DOM-BagOfTricks/) to XML::LibXML... and then release the result.

Is there any particular reason why XML::DOM::BagOfTricks does:

   addText($node, 'This is some text');

instead of adding the method to XML::DOM::Node itself, so that you  
could:

   $node->addText('This is some text');

?

I quite frequently take advantage of the fact that Perl lets you add  
methods to pre-existing classes.  I didn't think this was  
particularly unsafe (particularly if you don't mess with the innards  
of the object itself), and it's certainly convenient--but is there  
some good reason to avoid this?




--M.

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