Doesn't that rather depend on the type of the attribute? Personally, if I get an object back from accessor method then I expect that any modifications of that object's state will be seen the next time I look at the results of that accessor method. This is a direct result of the way reference types work, and the world is a better place because of it. If you want a (deep) copy of the returned object you should say so: my $res = $object.attribute.clone;
I recanted what you're replying to last week. Essentially, I agree with you that references of non-scalar values should be returned by default, and that the method must do an explicit copy if that's what they want returned. Things are much simpler that way, and its how Perl 5 worked. -- Darren Duncan
