Class Abuse

This situation arose recently and it got me curious...

What if you needed to access an algorithm in a very simple class method, but the functionality of the class is significant and would be a pain in the ass to set up and create an object in, not to mention resource-intensive, all to use one small function...

You could copy the algorithm, but what if it changes? Then you'll have to change it twice. That's no good. I don't like either option.

Remember when you call an object's method (or a class method) that the indirection syntax $self->method() or Whatever::Class->method() sends the thing before the -> as the first parameter.

So what if I just call that function directly? In some cases, I certainly could, for example: Whatever::Class::method($mydata)

In other cases, where the method looks in $self, I could just send the appropriate type of reference in with the value I needed, for example: Whatever::Class::method({data => $mydata})

In this case, it calls an accessor method -- in my example here, get_data() -- to get the value of one of its own properties. This is in line with some OOP philosophies, but it makes use of that method as an individual function that much more difficult.

However, I can just call the function with a first parameter which is an object that responds to the call to get_data

I wrote this naive decoder-ring algorithm to demonstrate.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use 5.14.0;
use autodie;

package Decoder_Ring;

sub new {
    my ( $class, $data ) = @_;
    return bless { data => $data }, $class;
}

sub decode {
    my ($self) = @_;
    return join( '',
        ( split( '', $self->get_data ) )
          [ 2, 7, 17, 24, 31, 37, 45, 54, 55, 65, 72, 77 ] );
}

sub get_data {
    my ($self) = @_;
    return $self->{data};
}

package main;

# Here's the normal object creation and method call to decode
my $normal_object =
  Decoder_Ring->new('?sSY y#ee Uiehor$cBc yL@rekLt AevLQYotUasjCGu!Z!a"');
print "normal result: ", $normal_object->decode, "\n";

# and here's the "fake" one:
# First, bless into unique class name to avoid polluting your namespace
my $pretender_object = bless {}, 'MyTemporaryClass';
my $input_data = 'l2a*lP lu*j!BfeCxssov@osol aupu Zwv+us P'
               . 'VSMvxekv vegA*crsY$L$2^ Sei!uVC$t!N?4.3';

# Next, push a method into the symbol table of the newly created class
*{MyTemporaryClass::get_data} = sub { return $input_data };

# Now our ad-hoc object will respond appropriately to the get_data call!
print "pretender result: ", Decoder_Ring::decode($pretender_object), "\n";

Output:

$ ./sandbox.pl
normal result: Secret!
pretender result: also secret.

But, I wouldn't put this in production code and I wouldn't recommend anyone else do it either, or at least comment heavily if you must.  However, it is an interesting exercise and illustrates Perl's highly flexible OO implementation.