I personally like my mutators/accessors made in such a way, that if you are setting a value, it will return the old value.

I find that this approach is a little strange. It makes sense for a subroutine like select or delete but for a get/set accessor I think the behaviour would be a touch unusual. A set accessor is like an assignment statement, and as such I would expect it to behave similarly to an assignment operator.

Although I admit that often I use the "return $self on set" approach quote a bite as I like the economy of notation that this provides the end user.

And of course, many of these accessor/mutator methods are created automatically when they are needed using some AUTOLOAD magic.

Ive done this as well, but apparently its use should be carefully considered as each time AUTOLOAD creates a new method the method cache is spoiled for _all_ methods, meaning that there could be considerable performance hit from doing it. I've not experimented to see how critical this is, but more than one knowledgable monk has made this assertion and I have little reason to doubt them.

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demerphq

_{<Elian> And I do take a kind of perverse pleasure in having an OO assembly language...}