“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).”