On Tue, 16 Sep 2003, Steve Purkis wrote: > On Tuesday, September 16, 2003, at 02:53 pm, Andy Wardley wrote:
> > On the other hand, I find it quite acceptable to have get_foo() > > that returns the foo, and set_foo($new_value) which sets the > > new value for foo and returns the object. In this case, the > > action is explicit in the method name. > > > > # this is when chaining is good, IMHO > > $obj->set_foo(10)->set_bar(20)->set_baz(30); > > > >> Question is: what style should be the default? I'm not looking for a > >> debate here, > [...] > But you bring up some points I've gotta answer -- first off, 'set_' & > 'get_' don't seem to be too popular (laziness?) so unless people prove > me wrong here, they're out for accessors.pm. [1] > [...] > [1] As a complete aside, I don't think 'get_' and 'set_' are bad ideas. > There's no reason reason someone couldn't write 'accessors::setget', > or 'getters' and 'setters' pragmas. Michael Schwern recently pointed > me to Ruby's 'attr_reader' and 'attr_writer' shortcuts - see > http://www.rubycentral.com/book/tut_classes.html +1 for getter/setters then. I resisted posting about it for fear of starting a debate, but apparently Andy couldn't help himself... ;--) I often have getters, or things that really look like getters at least, that are much happier when passed parameters. You can't do that with the usual Perl idiom of a single method. lvalues can be a solution, but do not work in all cases. -- Michel Rodriguez Perl & XML http://www.xmltwig.com
