Automatically call hash values that are subroutine references

Question

I have a hash with a few values that are not scalar data but rather anonymous subroutines that return scalar data. I want to make this completely transparent to the part of

Answer 1

There's a feature called "magic" that allows code to be called when variables are accessed.

Adding magic to a variable greatly slows down access to that variable, but some are more expensive than others.

• There's no need to make access to every element of the hash magical, just some values.
• tie is an more expensive form of magic, and it's not needed here.

As such, the most efficient solution is the following:

use Time::HiRes     qw( time );
use Variable::Magic qw( cast wizard );

{
   my $wiz = wizard(
      data => sub { my $code = $_[1]; $code },
      get => sub { ${ $_[0] } = $_[1]->(); },
   );

   sub make_evaluator { cast($_[0], $wiz, $_[1]) }
}

my %hash;
$hash{key1} = 'value1';
make_evaluator($hash{key2}, sub { 'value2@'.time });

print("$hash{$_}\n") for qw( key1 key2 key2 );

Output:

value1
value2@1462548850.76715
value2@1462548850.76721

---

Other examples:

my %hash; make_evaluator($hash{key}, sub { ... });
my $hash; make_evaluator($hash->{$key}, sub { ... });

my $x; make_evaluator($x, sub { ... });
make_evaluator(my $x, sub { ... });

make_evaluator(..., sub { ... });
make_evaluator(..., \&some_sub);

You can also "fix up" an existing hash. In your hash-of-hashes scenario,

my $hoh = {
   { 
      key1 => 'value1',
      key2 => sub { ... },
      ...
   },
   ...
);

for my $h (values(%$hoh)) {
   for my $v (values(%$h)) {
      if (ref($v) eq 'CODE') {
         make_evaluator($v, $v);
      }
   }
}