Object Oriented Perl

Defining an Object... General Methods

• You may also want to provide some general purpose methods unrelated to any attributes.
• Here is boilerplate for one of these methods. It's purpose is to display the contents of a particluar instance of a particular object to standard output. The code is as follows.
  

  ###############################
  ## General purpose method    ##
  ##                           ##
  ## Report an object          ##
  ###############################
  
  sub report {
      my $self = shift;
      print "Name:  $self->{NAME}\n";
      print "Age:   $self->{AGE}\n";
      print "Peers: @{ $self->{PEERS} }\n";
      return;
  }
  
  1;  # so the require or use succeeds
  

• Note we are ignoring any extra arguments. They are irrelevant to the function of our method.
• Also note the trailing "1;". This is a necessary part of the boilerplate for an object definition. It should appear at the end of a well behaved perl object.
• Again, this is decent boilerplate. You need not supply any additional methods, but you do need the "1;" at the end of your file.