Re: RFC: Automatic accessors for hash-based objects

On Sat, 26 Aug 2000, James Mastros wrote:

> This example shows how much easier it would have been to write the
> example on line 170 of perltoot.pod:
> 
>     package Person;
>     use strict;
>     
>     ##################################################
>     ## the object constructor (simplistic version)  ##
>     ##################################################
>     sub new {
>         my $self  = {};
>         $self->{name} :accessible('rw') = undef;
>         $self->{age}  :accessible('rw') = undef;
>         $self->{peers}:accessible('rw') = [];
>         bless($self);           # but see below
>         return $self;
>     }

This is an interesting idea.  I would think that ideally it would be
combined with pre-declared limited keyspace hashes (which we currently
have in a semi-crippled way with pseudohashes).  I'd much prefer that
these declarations happen outside the contructor, more like this maybe.  
Also I really dislike 'rw' and such.  Let's be a little clearer:

And this way we could drop the whole :accessible thing.  How about this:

use fields qw(
  name :read :write
  age  :read :write
  peers :read :write
  birth_date :read
);


Of course, what I think I really want is the ability to do a sort of
auto-tie so that instead of Perl generating accessors, it ties my
attributes directly to my own accessor function.  That could be
incorporated into this syntax perhaps?  Mayb as:

use fields qw(
  name :read => \&name :write => \&name
  age :read => \&get_age :write => \&set_age
);


Just some thoughts.


-dave

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