AUTOLOAD

[David Cantrell]

On Thu, Jan 18, 2007 at 05:56:42AM -0800, chromatic wrote:

> From 1994 to 2004, the object orientation documentation (especially of the 
> UNIVERSAL base class) had, at best, a passing familiarity with OO concepts 
> such as Liskov substitutability

What dat in plain English?

>                                 polymorphism, and inheritance.

In as much as perl does 'em (and polymorphism is a nasty overloaded term
in OO which seems to mean precisely what the speaker means it to mean)
it seems to document them pretty well.  Certainly well enough for me to
get shit done.

>                                                                 I'm not even 
> that pleased with its understanding of methods, for goodness sake, and it's a 
> real trick to have a working object system without passing messages.

A trick that works.

> 6) Did no one really notice that SUPER::some_method just plain doesn't work 

Mmmm, SUPER's a bit annoying.

> 7) Don't even get me started on the "It's a function!  No, it's a method!" 
> mess of CGI.pm.

That's a bug in CGI.pm, not in perl's OO system.  I recommend using
CGI.pm as little as possible.  Certainly never use it for more than
extracting information from the user's request.

You seem to be arguing that perl's OO is somehow defective because it
fails to match the Holy Grail of Smalltalk.  This is a bogus argument.
Perl does not aim to be perfect.  It aims to be useful.

-- 
David Cantrell | Enforcer, South London Linguistic Massive

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.
At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear
shoes, bathe and not make messes in the house.
   -- Robert A Heinlein