A First Pass at Object::Pad Some More
I wrote about my first pass earlier. This is not _substantially different, just some changes from perigrin, who is deeper into this rabbit hole than I have been.
First is :mutator.
Generates an lvalue mutator method to return or set the value of the slot. These are only permitted for scalar slots. If no name is given, the name of the slot is used
This means that this is valid:
$x = $obj->foo;
And so is this:
$obj->foo = $x
I’m sure I’ve tried that with my current understanding of Perl using out-of-the-box OOP, and gave up in frustration. I believe that :reader and :writer give some of that behavior, but I’ve not seen enough to really know for sure. I think that :reader means you can get this data from the object but can’t change it (directly, at least), while :writer means you can change it directly but can’t access it. I’ll have to code and play to find out.
While I’m :here ;) , I think I’ll mention that :param is there to indicate that this is fillable via new(). In my case, I’m automating the creation of nodes in a for loop, but it strikes me I could create it like:
$nodes{9} = CorNode->new( value => 9 );
$nodes{6} = CorNode->new( value => 6, right => $nodes{9} );
and so on.
Except, we get the problem that you need to assign the child’s parent and the parent’s child at the same time, and adding parent or left or right to the default constructor for the object would mean that either the parent or child doesn’t exist yet.
The administrivia is crossing my eyes. Again, I’ll have to get into this a lot more to really understand.
There was some expanding ternary into if () {} else {} that, because it was late and I was all out of INSERT CURSE HERE, perigrin suggested the following:
method is_leaf () { return !defined($left // $right) }
I have a slight problem with it, because these methods return 1 or undef, and I prefer 1 or 0, so my change is simply:
method is_leaf () { return !defined($left // $right) || 0 }
Yes, it’s pedantry, but it’s my pedantry.
If there’s more to do with this CorNode class, then I’ll keep with the 80s Zappa naming and write The Return of the Son of a First pass at Object::Pad, but I expect I’ll have to make something more clever, like Points coming together to become Shapes and being required to have an area() method, and so forth, and that’ll need a new name, as would subclassing Node to create Tree or Heap or something.