Sunday, September 18, 2011

Moose (a postmodern thing in Perl, or whatever) and circular reference+inheritence

Now speaking of Moose, the postmodern object system in Perl 5, taken from Perl 6, chewed, digested and... Whatever:-) Let's assume I have a class Animal like that:

package Animal;
use Moose;
use Animal::Dog;
use Animal::Cat;

has 'type' => (is=>'ro', isa=>'Str');

sub make_noise { print "Making noise."; }

sub specify {
  my $self = shift;

  return Animal::Dog->new({type=>$self->type()}) if($self->type() eq 'dog');
  return Animal::Cat->new({type=>$self->type()}) if($self->type() eq 'cat');
  return $self;
}

And two subclasses:

package Animal::Dog;
use Moose;
extends 'Animal';

override 'make_noise' => sub { print "Wuf!"; }



package Animal::Cat;
use Moose;
extends 'Animal';

override 'make_noise' => sub { print "Meow!"; }


It simply does not work. You will get some fucking strange message that the first override in the Animal::Cat failed (TODO: Add here the real message...) and I can understand why: In order to compile the Animal class it has to use (=load and compile) the Animal::Dog and Animal::Cat.

Any way around it? To use something like Factory design pattern known from Java. But, does it really mean I can not use any subclass in a superclass with Moose? Is it a feature or a bug?:-)

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