Further to Athanasius's comments above:

My understanding is that the object's innards should stay inside the object.

But they can't stay inside forever. After all, an object's innards are data, and data must be accessed and sometimes even (gasp) changed in order to be useful. Consider the  'name' attribute in the example code of the OP. It has no getter/setter method. Except by direct reading or writing via the object reference, which we all agree is a Really Bad Idea and which no one will ever do, this data cannot be accessed in any way. What good is it? Of course, you can imagine you might write another method that would access it, say along the lines of 

sub string_of {
    my $self = shift;
    return "$self->{color} $self->{name}";
    }
    
sub print {
    my $self = shift;
    printf "I am a %s \n", $self->string_of;
    }

[download]
Both these methods "expose" object attributes to application code without any risk that they may be changed, and why not? It's up to the library (or class) programmer to decide to offer such methods or not.

Give a man a fish:  <%-{-{-{-<

In reply to Re^3: OOP's setter/getter method - is there a way to avoid them? by AnomalousMonk
in thread OOP's setter/getter method - is there a way to avoid them? by tiny_monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.