NAME

ReleaseAction - call actions upon release.

SYNOPSIS

use ReleaseAction 'on_release';
{
  # OO style
  my $handle = ReleaseAction->new(
    sub {print "Exiting scope\n"}
  );
  print "In scope\n";
}
{
  # Functional style
  my $handle = on_release {print "Exiting scope\n"};
  print "In scope\n";
}
{
  my $rollback = on_release {rollback_trans()};
  if (do_stuff()) {
    $rollback->cancel();
  }
}

DESCRIPTION

This provides an easy way to create opaque handles which will do something when they are destroyed. There are two ways of creating a new handle. Both take one or more arguments, with the first being the action to take when the handle is released and the (optional) rest being the arguments that the handle will get.

• new is the method oriented constructor.

  my $handle = ReleaseAction->new(
    sub {print shift}, "Goodbye cruel world\n"
  );

• And an optional function on_release that you can import. For those who like that sort of thing, I have provided the prototype &@ for syntactic sugar.

  my $handle = on_release {print "Goodbye cruel world\n"};

• And should you decide that you don't want to do the action on release after all, you can call the cancel() method. As suggested in the SYNOPSIS, this is useful if you wish to set up transactional mechanics. Make the release action do your cleanup. And then when you commit your changes, cancel the cleanup.

EXAMPLE

use ReleaseAction 'on_release';

# This does the same thing as the module SelectSaver.
sub tmp_select {
  on_release {select shift} select shift;
}

print "This print goes to STDOUT\n";
{
  my $hold_select = tmp_select(\*STDERR);
  print "This print goes to STDERR\n";
}
print "Printing to STDOUT again\n";

A LONGER EXAMPLE

use Carp;
use Cwd;
use ReleaseAction;

sub cd_to {
  chdir($_[0]) or confess("Cannot chdir to $_[0]: $!");
}

sub tmp_cd {
  my $cwd = cwd();
  cd_to(shift);
  ReleaseAction->new(\&cd_to, $cwd);
}

sub something_interesting {
  my $in_dir = tmp_cd("some_dir");
  # Do something interesting in the new dir
  
  # I will automagically return to the old dir
  # when I exit the subroutine and $in_dir goes
  # out of scope.
}

BUGS

The future of reliable destruction mechanics in Perl 6 is still unknown. Many people want them, however they also want incompatible things like real garbage collection and implementations of Perl in .NET and the Java Virtual Machine.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks to Randal Schwartz for mentioning SelectSaver to me, and to ncw on PerlMonks for pointing out that prototypes would fit with on_release. I still don't like them, but they do make sense here.

AUTHOR AND COPYRIGHT

Written by Ben Tilly (ben_tilly@operamail.com).

Copyright 2001. This module may be modified and distributed on the same terms as Perl itself.