[Biodevelopers] Object Oriented Perl issue

[Steve O]

Joe,

You might want to check out Damian Conway's book Object Oriented Perl.
He shows how to use perl's AUTOLOAD feature to create get/set
methods on the fly if they don't exist.  This allows you to write 
get/set methods that have interesting behavior, and leave the simple 
ones for perl to make up. 

Here's the example:
sub AUTOLOAD {
    my ( $self, $newval ) = @_;
    if ($AUTOLOAD =~ /.*::get(_\w+)/ && $self->_accessable( $1, 'read' ))
    {
       my $attr_name=$1;
       *{$AUTOLOAD} = sub { return $_[0]->{$attr_name} };
       return $self->{$attr_name};
    }   
    elsif ($AUTOLOAD =~ /.*::set(_\w+)/ && $self->_accessable( $1, 'write'))
    {
       my $attr_name=$1;
       *{$AUTOLOAD} = sub { $_[0]->{$attr_name} = $_[1]; return };
       return $self->{$attr_name} = $newval;
    } 
    croak "No such method: $AUTOLOAD";
}

The argument I think OO people would have with your get_attribute
and set_attribute functions is that it allows access to all
of the object's state and allows no extra processing.  The methods
are providing no extra benefit over the simpler:
  $object->{fragment}="foo";
  print "fragment: ",$object->{fragment},"\n";


-steve