Re: Why inheriting the package?

On Tue, 25 Nov 2008, John Ky wrote:

> I just discovered that swig generated perl classes inherit from the parent
> package:
>
> package example::Vector;
> @ISA = qw( example );
>
> Why does it do this?  It's causing me trouble because I can't then add
> additional helper functions to the package that have the same name as method
> names.

My understanding is that this is done to give support methods to all 
classes.  See, e.g., the method TIEHASH defined in the parent package.

I think a better way to do this would be to put these methods in a 
sub-package (class) and have everything inherit from that.  With the 
current set-up, some confusion between methods and non-member functions is 
possible.  However, I don't see why it would prevent you from adding 
functions with the same names as methods, unless you're using a fairly old 
version of SWIG (it used to put the package before other bases, but now 
puts it after; I'm not sure why subclasses need it at all).

Josh

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