Re: code organization style

[muppet <scott asofyet org>]

On Apr 22, 2005, at 1:42 PM, Gabor Szabo wrote:

> How do you people do it ?
> Where can I see examples ?

It's all about what you're after and what's right for your program.

I like to create classes to divide up the work.  The classes can be  
widgets, or data classes, or control classes, whatever makes sense.

You don't *have* to put your classes in separate files.  It's quite  
legal to declare multiple packages in a single perl source file.  This  
is mostly a deployment issue; if your classes are in separate files,  
your script has to be able to find them at runtime, which means they  
need to be installed somewhere --- in the perl library, in a private  
data directory, somewhere --- and that can make hard to deploy your  
program if you want it to be self-contained.  It also raises namespace  
issues, and reuse issues, and versioning issues.

My rule of thumb is:  if this code is or could be useful outside the  
context of my program, i'll make a separate module of it, otherwise,  
keep it inside the main file until that file gets too unwieldy, at  
which point something has to go.


As an example, i put several extra packages into the single-file  
object_browser so that the program could be distributed as a single  
script.
http://asofyet.org/muppet/software/gtk2-perl/object_browser- 
methodscraper
Note that i had to add a few BEGIN blocks that you wouldn't see if the  
packages were in separate files, in order to ensure that the code in  
them runs at the right time.


--
"There's a documentary that i wanted to watch on PBS.  I heard about it  
in NPR.  ... Oh my god, did i just say that?"
  -- elysse