On Sun, May 30, 2004 at 04:57:36PM -0700, Rob Richardson wrote: > Greetings! > > I found the source of the "impossible error". Here are the lines that > caused it: > > my $userList = new UserList($userFile); > my $user = UserList->GetUser($logname); > > I have a "use UserList" line near the top of this file. I also have > "use strict" and "use warnings". > > I would have expected Perl to complain about the bareword "UserList" in > the second line, or find some other way to complain about it. Instead, > it merrily tried to execute this line, and threw the error message > halfway through the GetUser() function in the UserList package. Why > didn't an error get thrown? If this is a valid construct in Perl, how > is it supposed to be used?
Those two lines are probably more similar that you expect. C<my $userList = new UserList($userFile);> is known as indirect object syntax, and it is almost the same as C<my $userList = UserList->new($userFile);>. Knowing this, you may perhaps see why your GetUser method was being called with a first parameter of "UserList". Indirect object syntax is slightly frowned upon these days since there are some rare situations in which it may not do what you expect. See http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/websoft/libwww-perl/archive/1998h1/0109.html -- Paul Johnson - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pjcj.net -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
