perlpragma

DESCRIPTION
       A pragma is a module which influences some aspect of the compile time
       or run time behaviour of Perl, such as "strict" or "warnings". With
       Perl 5.10 you are no longer limited to the built in pragmata; you can
       now create user pragmata that modify the behaviour of user functions
       within a lexical scope.

A basic example
       For example, say you need to create a class implementing overloaded
       mathematical operators, and would like to provide your own pragma that
       functions much like "use integer;" You'd like this code

           use MyMaths;

           my $l = MyMaths->new(1.2);
           my $r = MyMaths->new(3.4);

           print "A: ", $l + $r, "\n";

           use myint;
           print "B: ", $l + $r, "\n";

           {
               no myint;
               print "C: ", $l + $r, "\n";
           }

           print "D: ", $l + $r, "\n";

           no myint;
           print "E: ", $l + $r, "\n";

       to give the output

           A: 4.6
           B: 4
           C: 4.6
           D: 4
           E: 4.6

       i.e., where "use myint;" is in effect, addition operations are forced
       to integer, whereas by default they are not, with the default behaviour
       being restored via "no myint;"

       The minimal implementation of the package "MyMaths" would be something
       like this:

           package MyMaths;
           use warnings;
           use strict;
           use myint();
           use overload '+' => sub {
               my ($l, $r) = @_;

           1;

       Note how we load the user pragma "myint" with an empty list "()" to
       prevent its "import" being called.

       The interaction with the Perl compilation happens inside package
       "myint":

           package myint;

           use strict;
           use warnings;

           sub import {
               $^H{myint} = 1;
           }

           sub unimport {
               $^H{myint} = 0;
           }

           sub in_effect {
               my $level = shift // 0;
               my $hinthash = (caller($level))[10];
               return $hinthash->{myint};
           }

           1;

       As pragmata are implemented as modules, like any other module, "use
       myint;" becomes

           BEGIN {
               require myint;
               myint->import();
           }

       and "no myint;" is

           BEGIN {
               require myint;
               myint->unimport();
           }

       Hence the "import" and "unimport" routines are called at compile time
       for the user's code.

       User pragmata store their state by writing to the magical hash "%^H",
       hence these two routines manipulate it. The state information in "%^H"
       is stored in the optree, and can be retrieved at runtime with
       "caller()", at index 10 of the list of returned results. In the example
       pragma, retrieval is encapsulated into the routine "in_effect()", which
       takes as parameter the number of call frames to go up to find the value
       are stringified.  If you need to store multiple values or complex
       structures, you should serialise them, for example with "pack".  The
       deletion of a hash key from "%^H" is recorded, and as ever can be
       distinguished from the existence of a key with value "undef" with
       "exists".

       Don't attempt to store references to data structures as integers which
       are retrieved via "caller" and converted back, as this will not be
       threadsafe.  Accesses would be to the structure without locking (which
       is not safe for Perl's scalars), and either the structure has to leak,
       or it has to be freed when its creating thread terminates, which may be
       before the optree referencing it is deleted, if other threads outlive
       it.



perl v5.10.1                      2009-02-12                     PERLPRAGMA(1)