Further to Athanasius's comments above:
My understanding is that the object's innards should stay inside the object.
But they can't stay inside forever. After all, an object's innards are data, and data must be accessed and sometimes even (gasp) changed in order to be useful. Consider the 'name' attribute in the example code of the OP. It has no getter/setter method. Except by direct reading or writing via the object reference, which we all agree is a Really Bad Idea and which no one will ever do, this data cannot be accessed in any way. What good is it? Of course, you can imagine you might write another method that would access it, say along the lines of
sub string_of {
my $self = shift;
return "$self->{color} $self->{name}";
}
sub print {
my $self = shift;
printf "I am a %s \n", $self->string_of;
}
Both these methods "expose" object attributes to application code without any risk that they may be changed, and why not? It's up to the library (or class) programmer to decide to offer such methods or not.
Give a man a fish: <%-{-{-{-<
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|