Brothers, for reasons that I won't bore you with I have a big hashy structure thing and now I want to objectify it so that I create a corresponding method for each fieldname. So in my naivety I started writing a method for each key of the hash within my package (class) as follows:

sub status {
return $_[0]->{status};
}
sub deadline {
return $_[0]->{deadline};
}
sub chasedate {
return $_[0]->{chasedate};
}
.
.
.
[download]

When it suddenly occurred to me that if this cannot be how the great God Wall intended things to be. Repetition not being a favourite thing in any PL, let alone PERL. However, I am not too savvy with objects let alone doing clever stuff with subroutines. I'm sure there's an easy answer to eliminating all these methods into a single clever one. Can anyone elucidate?