Perl 5 is not a pervasively object oriented language. Its core data types (scalars, arrays, and hashes) are not objects with methods you can overload. Even so, you can control the behavior of your own classes and objects, especially when they undergo coercion or evaluation in various contexts. This is overloading.
Overloading can be subtle but powerful. An interesting example is overloading how an object behaves in boolean context, especially if you use something like the Null Object pattern (http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?NullObject). In boolean context, an object will be true... but not if you overload boolification.
You can overload what the object does for almost every operation: stringification, numification, boolification, iteration, invocation, array access, hash access, arithmetic operations, comparison operations, smart match, bitwise operations, and even assignment.
The most useful are often the most common: stringification, numification, and boolification. The overload pragma allows you to associate a function with an operation you can overload. Here's a class which overloads boolean evaluation:
In all boolean contexts, every instance of this class will evaluate to false.
The arguments to the overload pragma are pairs where the key describes the type of overload and the value is a function reference to call in place of Perl's default behavior for that object.
It's easy to add a stringification:
Overriding numification is more complex, because arithmetic operators tend to be binary ops (arity). Given two operands both with overloaded methods for addition, which takes precedence? The answer needs to be consistent, easy to explain, and understandable by people who haven't read the source code of the implementation.
perldoc overload attempts to explain this in the sections labeled Calling Conventions for Binary Operations and MAGIC AUTOGENERATION, but the easiest solution is to overload numification and tell overload to use the provided overloads as fallbacks where possible:
Setting fallback to a true value lets Perl use any other defined overloads to compose the requested operation, if possible. If that's not possible, Perl will act as if there were no overloads in effect. This is often what you want.
Without fallback, Perl will only use the specific overloadings you have provided. If someone tries to perform an operation you have not overloaded, Perl will throw an exception.
Subclasses inherit overloadings from their ancestors. They may override this behavior in one of two ways. If the parent class uses overloading as shown, with function references provided directly, a child class must override the parent's overloaded behavior by using overload directly.
Parent classes can allow their descendants more flexibility by specifying the name of a method to call to implement the overloading, rather than hard-coding a function reference:
Child classes do not have to use overload themselves; they can merely override the appropriate get_* methods. This is often more flexible.
Overloading may seem like a tempting tool to use to produce symbolic shortcuts for new operations. The IO::All CPAN distribution pushes this idea to its limit to produce clever ideas for concise and composable code. Yet for every brilliant API refined through the appropriate use of overloading, a dozen more messes congeal. Sometimes the best code eschews cleverness in favor of simple and straightforward design.
Overriding addition, multiplication, and even concatenation on a Matrix class makes sense, only because the existing notation for those operations is pervasive. A new problem domain without that established notation is a poor candidate for overloading, as is a problem domain where you have to squint to make Perl's existing operators match a different notation.
Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices suggests that the other useful use of overloading is to prevent the accidental abuse of objects. For example, overloading numification to croak() for objects which have no reasonable single numeric representation can help you find real bugs in real programs. Overloading in Perl 5 is relatively rare, but this suggestion can improve the reliability and safety of programs.
Hey! The above document had some coding errors, which are explained below:
- Around line 3:
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- Around line 12:
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