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.