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Postings from November 2003
On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 12:37:49PM -0800, Michael Jacob wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> As we have seen in the last month, both UNIVERSAL:: and UNIVERSAL.pm are
> broken in concept. Multiple fixes/workarounds have been discussed, but
> none took. So I took some time to layout the root of the problem in my
> head. This is the result:
>
>
> 1.) Change can()'s semantics.
>
> can() returns unexpected reults if any module changed something in the
> UNIVERSAL:: package. This can make other modules fail, we have seen this
> with DBI(!)... So:
>
> Starting with Perl 5.8.12, can() shall not search the package UNIVERSAL
> for inherited methods unless UNIVERSAL is explicitly included in the
> @ISA of the class tested against.
>
> This means that
>
> @Foo::Bar::ISA = qw();
> (bless {}, 'Foo::Bar')->can('can')
>
> will return false, but
>
> @Foo::Bar::ISA = qw( UNIVERSAL );
> (bless {}, 'Foo::Bar')->can('can')
>
> will return true.
>
> Starting with Perl 5.8.10, can() will issue a warning when returning a
> value that it would not return with above change implemented: "Testing
> for methods implicitly inherited from UNIVERSAL with can() is
> deprecated"
>
> I think, this change should not break any well written module. Testing
> for any method that's in UNIVERSAL is just useless, we already know
> before the test that it must be there. Any module that want's to know if
> there is some additional method in UNIVERSAL:: can just test against
> UNIVERSAL->can() directly.
But C<can> doesn't just test for existance, it returns a code ref of the
method if found. Thus C<$code = $obj->can('can')> is perfectly
reasonable, and should return a ref to UNIVERSAL::can if there aren't
any others in the inheritance chain.
--
You live and learn (although usually you just live).
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