[Bioperl-l] Re: Automatic generation of set and get methods

[Lincoln Stein]

On Friday 15 November 2002 02:28 am, Ewan Birney wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Nov 2002, Heikki Lehvaslaiho wrote:
> > Hilmar is here restateing a long standing opinion of the core group that
> > autogenerating methods tends to lead into problems sooner or later in
> > the life cycle of modules and that their use is therefore strongly
> > discouraged.
>
> Or at least stick-in-the-muds like me and Hilmar and Heikki. I suspect
> Linclon is ok with it.

I use BEGIN{ } autocompiled methods a lot for simple set/get accessors (in 
non-bioperl modules) and have never had problems with them.  I agree with the 
stick-in-the-muds that AUTOLOAD is scary.

> This is a "to taste" feature of Perl, and I guess we just have to decide.
> I don't like it because it (in my experience) it produces hard-to-find
> bugs which can remain dormant for a while, but... again, I think it is
> just about a general feel of what we would like to do.
>
>
> I certainly don't see that much sense in destablising massive amount of
> existing code (and *definitely* not as we get close to 1.2).

I certainly agree with that!!!

Lincoln