Linux Magazine: An Object Lesson in Perl Jul 3, 2000, 23 :58 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (4532 reads) (Other stories by Randal L. Schwartz)
"In the past three columns, I looked at using "references" in Perl. References are an
important part of capturing and reflecting the structure of real-world data -- for
example, a table of employees, each of whom has various attributes, can be
represented as an array of hashrefs, pointing at attribute hashes for each
employee."
"Now let's turn to capturing and reflecting real-world processes, in the form of
"objects." Objects provide encapsulation (to control access to data), abstract data
types (to let the data more closely model the real world), and inheritance (to reuse
operations that are similar but have some variation)."
"The Perl distribution includes perlobj, a basic reference in using objects, and
perltoot, which introduces readers to the peculiarities of Perl's object system in a
tutorial way. However, I found that both of these documentation sections tend to be
opaque to those of us with less experience with objects. And that seems to be the
majority of users coming from a system-administration or CGI Web-development
background (Perl's core audience)."
