parent - Establish an ISA relationship with base classes at compile time

NAME SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION HISTORY CAVEATS SEE ALSO AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS MAINTAINER LICENSE

NAME

parent − Establish an ISA relationship with base classes at compile time

DESCRIPTION

Allows you to both load one or more modules, while setting up inheritance from those modules at the same time. Mostly similar in effect to

package Baz;
BEGIN {
require Foo;
require Bar;
push @ISA, qw(Foo Bar);
}

By default, every base class needs to live in a file of its own. If you want to have a subclass and its parent class in the same file, you can tell "parent" not to load any modules by using the "−norequire" switch:

package Foo;
sub exclaim { "I CAN HAS PERL" }
package DoesNotLoadFooBar;
use parent −norequire, 'Foo', 'Bar';
# will not go looking for Foo.pm or Bar.pm

This is equivalent to the following code:

package Foo;
sub exclaim { "I CAN HAS PERL" }
package DoesNotLoadFooBar;
push @DoesNotLoadFooBar::ISA, 'Foo', 'Bar';

This is also helpful for the case where a package lives within a differently named file:

package MyHash;
use Tie::Hash;
use parent −norequire, 'Tie::StdHash';

This is equivalent to the following code:

package MyHash;
require Tie::Hash;
push @ISA, 'Tie::StdHash';

If you want to load a subclass from a file that "require" would not consider an eligible filename (that is, it does not end in either ".pm" or ".pmc"), use the following code:

package MySecondPlugin;
require './plugins/custom.plugin'; # contains Plugin::Custom
use parent −norequire, 'Plugin::Custom';