The Perl You Need to Know, Part II: Working with Nested Subroutines Page 4

By Stas Bekman (Send Email)
Posted Sep 1, 2000

First you might wonder, why in the world will someone need to define an inner subroutine? Well, for example to reduce some of Perl's script startup overhead you might decide to write a daemon that will compile the scripts and modules only once, and cache the pre-compiled code in memory. When some script is to be executed, you just tell the daemon the name of the script to run and it will do the rest and do it much faster since compilation has already taken place.

Seems like an easy task, and it is. The only problem is once the script is compiled, how do you execute it? Or let's put it the other way: after it was executed for the first time and it stays compiled in the daemon's memory, how do you call it again? If you could get all developers to code their scripts so each has a subroutine called run() that will actually execute the code in the script then we've solved half the problem.

But how does the daemon know to refer to some specific script if they all run in the main:: name space? One solution might be to ask the developers to declare a package in each and every script, and for the package name to be derived from the script name. However, since there is a chance that there will be more than one script with the same name but residing in different directories, then in order to prevent namespace collisions the directory has to be a part of the package name too. And don't forget that the script may be moved from one directory to another, so you will have to make sure that the package name is corrected every time the script gets moved.

But why enforce these strange rules on developers, when we can arrange for our daemon to do this work? For every script that the daemon is about to execute for the first time, the script should be wrapped inside the package whose name is constructed from the mangled path to the script and a subroutine called run(). For example if the daemon is about to execute the script /tmp/hello.pl:

  print "Hello\n";

Prior to running it, the daemon will change the code to be:

  package cache::tmp::hello_2epl;
  sub run{
    print "Hello\n";

The package name is constructed from the prefix cache::, each directory separation slash is replaced with ::, and non alphanumeric characters are encoded so that for example . (a dot) becomes _2e (an underscore followed by the ASCII code for a dot in hex representation).

 % perl -e 'printf "%x",ord(".")'

prints: 2e. The underscore is the same you see in URL encoding except the % character is used instead (%2E), but since % has a special meaning in Perl (prefix of hash variable) it couldn't be used.

Now when the daemon is requested to execute the script /tmp/hello.pl, all it has to do is to build the package name as before based on the location of the script and call its run() subroutine:

  use cache::tmp::hello_2epl;

We have just written a partial prototype of the daemon we wanted. The only outstanding problem is how to pass the path to the script to the daemon. This detail is left as an exercise for the reader.

If you are familiar with the Apache::Registry module, you know that it works in almost the same way. It uses a different package prefix and the generic function is called handler() and not run(). The scripts to run are passed through the HTTP protocol's headers.

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