Re: [Templates] Design question

> I want something that acts like both a hash and an array. The easiest

Buddy Burden wrote:
> I want something that acts like both a hash and an array.  The easiest 
> way (AFAIK, anyway) is to make an object with overloaded hash and array 
> dereferencing.

I actually have never heard of anyone doing that before.  A more common 
approach is to simply implement the tied hash interface, like 
Tie::IxHash does.  What you're doing sounds like overloading, not tie-ing.

> The overloaded array deref just returns the array that 
> the data's stored in.  But the overloaded hash deref can't do that, 
> because the data's not stored in a hash (and can't be unless I want to 
> keep two copies of the data)

That's what most of the other modules do.  Seems like a reasonable 
solution in most cases, but can be a problem with huge amounts of data.

> it's more about having something that _mostly_ acts like a hash, 
> but also has some limitations (such as the original pseudohashes, or 
> replacements for them such as Tie::Hash::FixedKeys).

FYI, the official way to do this now is with Hash::Util, which is part 
of the core library.

- Perrin

_______________________________________________
templates mailing list
templates@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx
http://lists.template-toolkit.org/mailman/listinfo/templates