kentcowgill.org/blog

So, I released another module to CPAN today.

It's called Perl::Critic::Nits, which at this point only has one policy module, one that discourages accessing what appears to be private member data of a class. Feel free to have a look. Though if you're reading this post significantly after the date I'm posting it, that version may no longer be the most recent release.

It pretty much looks for anything that accesses a hashref subscript or an arrayref subscript. And in case you can't guess - that can be a problem if you're not dealing with an object. Like if, for instance, you have a regular old hash reference.

Drat.

Elliot Shank reminded me that the code being examined isn't compiled, so it's a little tough to figure out whether or not something isa blessed object, or just a plain hashref. D'oh.

At least it's easy enough to disable a policy. :/

However, it will definitely catch attempts to access an object's member data directly, so I don't feel so bad about that. So long as the pseudo convention of assigning $_[0] to a variable called at least either $self, $package, or $class.

Please enjoy, and let me know if you run into any bugs.