NAME

       Class::Inner - A perlish implementation of Java like inner classes

SYNOPSIS

           use Class::Inner;

           my $object = Class::Inner->new(
               parent => 'ParentClass',
               methods => { method => sub { ... } }, },
               constructor => 'new',
               args => [@constructor_args],
           );

DESCRIPTION

       Yet another implementation of an anonymous class with per object overrideable methods, but with the added
       attraction of sort of working dispatch to the parent class's method.

   METHODS
       new HASH
           Takes a hash like argument list with the following keys.

           parent
               The name of the parent class. Note that you can only get single inheritance with this or SUPER
               won't work.

           methods
               A hash, keys are method names, values are CODEREFs.

           constructor
               The name of the constructor method. Defaults to 'new'.

           args
               An anonymous array of arguments to pass to the constructor. Defaults to an empty list.

           Returns an object in an 'anonymous' class which inherits from the parent class. This anonymous class
           has a couple of 'extra' methods:

           SUPER
               If you were to pass something like

                   $obj = Class::Inner->new(
                       parent  => 'Parent',
                       methods => { method =>  sub { ...; $self->SUPER::method(@_) } },
                   );

               then "$self-"gt"SUPER::method" almost certainly wouldn't do what you expect, so we provide the
               "SUPER" method which dispatches to the parent implementation of the current method. There seems
               to be no good way of getting the full "SUPER::" functionality, but I'm working on it.

           DESTROY
               Because Class::Inner works by creating a whole new class name for your object, it could
               potentially leak memory if you create a lot of them. So we add a "DESTROY" method that removes
               the class from the symbol table once it's finished with.

               If you need to override a parent's DESTROY method, adding a call to
               "Class::Inner::clean_symbol_table(ref $self)" to it. Do it at the end of the method or your other
               method calls won't work.

       clean_symbol_table
           The helper subroutine that DESTROY uses to remove the class from the symbol table.

       new_classname
           Returns a name for the next anonymous class.

AUTHOR

       Maintained by Arun Prasaad  "<arunbear@cpan.org>"

       Copyright (c) 2001 by Piers Cawley <pdcawley@iterative-software.com>.

       All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
       same terms as perl itself.

       Thanks to the Iterative Software people: Leon Brocard, Natalie Ford and Dave Cross. Also, this module was
       written initially for use in the PerlUnit project, AKA Test::Unit. Kudos to Christian Lemburg and the
       rest of that team.

SEE ALSO

       There are a million and one differen Class constructors available on CPAN, none of them does quite what I
       want, so I wrote this one to add to that population where hopefully it will live and thrive.

BUGS

       Bound to be some. Actually the "SUPER" method is a workaround for what I consider to be a bug in perl.