What you also can do is:

for my $prop (qw [field1 field2 field3]) {
    eval sprintf <<'END', ($prop) x 3;
        sub %s {
            my $self = shift;
            if (@_) {$self->{%s} = shift};
            return $self->{%s};
         }
    }
END
}
[download]

I used to generate accessors in this way, in part because I felt that glob manipulation was scary and turning off strictness, however temporarily, was fragile. Tom Christiansen eventually managed to convince me that the eval approach is bad - firstly it is wasteful of memory (and processor) because each method is recompiled afresh; secondly because it is deferred, and so a perl -c check won't show problems.

So these days I do it more like this:

for my $method (qw/ field1 field2 field3 /) {
  no strict 'refs';
  *$method = sub {
    use strict 'refs';
    my $self = shift;
    if (@_) {$self->{$method} = shift};
    return $self->{$method};
  };
}
[download]

Rather than creating 3 independent blocks of code, this creates 3 closures over the same block of code; in practice the resulting methods are otherwise identical. I also feel they are much easier to read this way, which is another aid for debugging and maintenance.

(I saw an alternative approach to the strictness here recently:

  for my $method (qw/ ... /) {
    my $sub = sub { the code ... };
    no strict 'refs';
    *$method = $sub;
  }
[download]

.. which is probably better, but I haven't started using it yet.)

See Re: Things I Don't Use in Perl for some other things my autogenerated methods do.

Hugo