What is the difference between parent and base in Perl 5?

perl subclass pragma
Chas. Owens picture Chas. Owens · May 18, 2009 · Viewed 13.1k times · Source

There appears to be a new pragma named parent that does roughly the same thing as base. What does parent do that warrants a new (non-core) module? I am missing something?

Answer

ysth picture ysth · May 18, 2009

base tried to do one too many things – automatically handling loading modules but also allowing establishing inheritance from classes already loaded (possibly from a file whose name wasn't based on the module name). To sort of make it work, there was some hackery that caused surprising results in some cases. Rather than break backwards compatibility, a new, replacement pragma parent was introduced with cleaner semantics.

parent will be a core module as of 5.10.1.

Update: forgot that base handles fields (if you are using the fields pragma), which parent doesn't do.

Related questions

Find size of an array in Perl

I seem to have come across several different ways to find the size of an array. What is the difference between these three methods? my @arr = (2); print scalar @arr; # First way to print array size print $#arr; # Second way to …

Read More
How do I break out of a loop in Perl?

I'm trying to use a break statement in a for loop, but since I'm also using strict subs in my Perl code, I'm getting an error saying: Bareword "break" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at ./final.pl line 154. …

Read More
How to fix a locale setting warning from Perl?

When I run perl, I get the warning: perl: warning: Setting locale failed. perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LANG = "en_US.UTF-8" are supported and installed on your system. perl: warning: Falling …

Read More