[Bioperl-l] 0.7 release: Bio::Root::* classes

[Matthew Pocock]

Ewan Birney wrote:

> On Tue, 14 Nov 2000, Jason Stajich wrote:
>
> > Comments on a better way to handle this?
>
> perl does not handle this great, but you can write a new function in the
> subclass which calls the new in the base class with arguments and then
> reblesses into the subclass.
>
> not pretty, but nor is _initialize
>

The rebless is realy the best oo way to do this as during construction time, an object should only be
able to execute the methods & access the fields of the class being initialized and all parent
classes, not sub-class methods etc. - repeated blessing means that this is what you get. It is
generaly realy *bad* for a base-class to call overridden methods in a constructor, as these may
access uninitialized state of the sub-class. There would be nothing wrong with new calling
_initialize after re-blessing, as long as _initialize did not chain onto SUPER::_initialize, and it
was invoked as a function not a method:

e.g.

_initialize($self, @args);

not

$self->_initialize(@args);

but this then begs the question - why have two functions instead of one (new + _initialize vs new).

Matthew

>
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> Ewan Birney. Mobile: +44 (0)7970 151230, Work: +44 1223 494420
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