Wednesday, 4 July 2007

Sub::Current

I've released another new heavily magic Perl module on CPAN, this time scratching an itch of Yves Orton. It's called Sub::Current and allows you to get a reference to the currently executing subroutine.

At first I wanted to use a tied scalar instead of a function to get this reference; however, due to the way parameter passing is implemented in Perl, that's not easily possible: the tied variable (let's call it ${^ROUTINE}) is FETCHed at the innermost scope, so this won't work:


sub foo {
# here ${^ROUTINE} points to bar(), not to foo() !
bar( ${^ROUTINE} );
}

I think that could be done by tweaking some of the ck_ functions that are used to optimize Perl's internal optree during the compilation phase. I know that some people are not afraid to do this, but I feel that this would be a rather fragile solution, for only a little bit of syntactic sugar.

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