Well, one piece of advice for OO in Perl which I myself picked up from this site (in dws's comments here), is that it's a tidy piece of good practice to separate your blessing from actually initialising your object variables. This requires 2 methods, which you might as well call sub new and sub initialise.

So for your constructor, you'd have: 

package Food;

sub new 
{   my $class = shift;
    my $self = bless {}, $class;
    $self->initialize;
    $self;
}

sub initialize {
    my $self = shift;
    $self->{_beverage} = "Pepsi";
    $self->{_entree} = "soup";
    $self->{_dessert} = "ice cream";
}

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I think it's conventional to put an underscore before your object variable names too, eg _beverage.

This may look like a bit of a waste of space, but its neatness might become a bit more obvious when you are actually passing initialisation info to the constructor (as opposed to everything starting off as Pepsi, soup, ice cream). Then you'd change the line in new to $self->initialize(@_);, and then have 

sub initialize {
    my $self = shift;
    $self->{_beverage} = shift;
    $self->{_entree} = shift;
    $self->{_dessert} = shift;
}

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Call it with something like 
my $meal = new Food("tea", "sushi", "creme egg");

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HTH
Dennis

In reply to Re: Object Oriented Programming in Perl. by Basilides
in thread Object Oriented Programming in Perl. by DigitalKitty

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