Re: [PATCH] add -p: import Term::ReadKey with 'require'

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 7, 2009, 04:54 UTC
Message-ID: <20090207045401.GA21135@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <200902070021.18928.trast@student.ethz.ch>

On Sat, Feb 07, 2009 at 12:21:13AM +0100, Thomas Rast wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> > (note that you could also skip the import and just call
> > Term::ReadKey::ReadKey by its full name).
> 
> I tried that but couldn't get either Term::ReadKey::ReadKey or
> Term::ReadKey->ReadKey to work.  In retrospect, I suppose it requires
> parentheses too.

Right, you would still need the parentheses. But note that the second syntax (with the "->") would always be wrong. The "::" syntax just says "find this name not in the current namespace, but in this absolute namespace I am giving you". But "X->Y" is actually a syntactic shorthand for "look up X::Y (or Z::Y, where Z is the blessed package of X), and then call X::Y(X, @_)".

Which makes sense for object-oriented stuff. You get the object or the classname as the first parameter to a method. But for a regular package function, you would be calling

  Term::ReadKey::ReadKey('Term::ReadKey', 0)

which of course makes no sense.

But I think doing the import makes more sense (and is how Term::ReadKey is intended to be used), so the patch you posted is best.

-Peff