NAME

SUPER - Control superclass method despatch

SYNOPSIS

sub my_method {
    my $self = shift;
    my $super = $self->super("my_method"); # Who's your daddy?

    if ($want_to_deal_with_this) { ... }
    else { $super->($self, @_) }
}

Or just, Ruby-style:

sub my_method {
    my $self = shift;

    if ($want_to_deal_with_this) { ... }
    else { super }
}

DESCRIPTION

When subclassing a class, you occasionally want to despatch control to the superclass - at least conditionally and temporarily. The Perl syntax for calling your superclass is ugly and unwieldy:

$self->SUPER::method(@_);

Especially when compared with its Ruby equivalent:

super;

This module provides that equivalent, along with the universal method super to determine one's own superclass. This allows you do to things like

goto &{$_[0]->super("my_method")};

if you don't like wasting precious stack frames. (And since super returns a coderef, much like "can" in UNIVERSAL, this doesn't break use strict 'refs'.)

NOTES

It has been pointed out that using super doesn't let you pass alternate arguments to your superclass's method. If you want to pass different arguments, well, don't use super then. D'oh.

This module does a small amount of Deep Magic to find out what arguments the method calling super itself had, and this may confuse things like Devel::Cover.

AUTHOR

Simon Cozens, simon@cpan.org

LICENSE

This silly little module may be distributed under the same terms as Perl itself.