Perl OOP Blessing

Question

I'm new to Perl and I've been making my way through this tutorial http://qntm.org/files/perl/perl.html

Anyways, I'm working on creating a package that will take in a matrix and will perform various basic operations (i.e. gaussian elimination, rref, back sub, deterimants, etc). I have my constructor taking in a list of references, but I'm having some trouble blessing them so I can access them later. My code thus far:

main.pl:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Matrix;

my @list = ([1,1,1],[2,2,2]);
my $matrix = Matrix->new(@list);

$matrix->test();

Matrix.pm:

package Matrix;
    sub new(){
        my $class = shift;
        my $self = [];

        my @params = @_;
        $self = \@params;

        print scalar @{$self->[1]}; #just testing some output...(outputs 3 as expected)

        bless $self,$class;

        return $self;
    }

    sub test(){
        print @{$self->[1]}; #does not output anything
    }

1;

I'm assuming the problem is that the references that $self is referring to is not being blessed, but I'm not sure how to do this. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

You forgot to actually define $self in test; it's not available for you automatically. This is why you should always put use warnings; use strict; in every Perl source file: so that the compiler will tell you about errors like these. (Also, there's no point in writing sub new() instead of sub new, and likewise for test; the function prototype is not only wrong but will be flat-out ignored when new is used as a method, i.e., how new is supposed to be used.)