How do you create objects in Perl?

Question

Perl has OOP features, but they are somewhat rarely used. How do you create and use Perl objects with methods and properties?

Answer 1

You should definitely take a look at Moose.

package Point;
use Moose; # automatically turns on strict and warnings

has 'x' => (is => 'rw', isa => 'Int');
has 'y' => (is => 'rw', isa => 'Int');

sub clear {
    my $self = shift;
    $self->x(0);
    $self->y(0);
}

Moose gives you (among other things) a constructor, accessor methods, and type checking for free!

So in your code you can:

my $p = Point->new({x=>10 , y=>20}); # Free constructor
$p->x(15);     # Free setter
print $p->x(); # Free getter
$p->clear();
$p->x(15.5);   # FAILS! Free type check.

A good starting point is Moose::Manual and Moose::Cookbook

If you just need the basic stuff you can also use Mouse which is not as complete, but without most of the compile time penalty.