Always turn on warnings (<samp>perl -w</samp> or <samp>use warnings</samp> in newer Perls); for that matter, use strict unless you have good reason not to. In your case, -w would have caught the bug in your constructor: 

sub new
{
    my $class = shift;
    return bless($Person::list,shift);
}

[download]
doesn't use $class, instead preferring to shift some other element off of @_ to use as the class name. Additionally, you're always blessing and returning the same object (needlessly stored in a global variable), which is probably not what you wanted to do. In your case, you're passing undef to bless; you want to say 
sub new
{
    my $class = shift;
    return bless({},$class);
}

[download]
Continuing down your code, your methods aren't reading the object they should be working on. You want to say e.g. 
sub name 
{
    my $self = shift;
    $self->{NAME} = shift;
}

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Do this, and you should be able to say e.g. 
my $person = new Person;
$person->name('Me');

[download]

I'm curious, though, why you say ``the code in "Perl Cookbook" didn't work''. Could you please point us to what isn't working there?

In reply to Re: Classes Are Killing Me by ariels
in thread Classes Are Killing Me by straywalrus

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