The decision about whether to have public get/set methods is an entirely tangential question.

This is sometimes called the "Uniform Access Principle" (coined, I think, by Meyer in his Object Oriented Software Construction - my copy's gone walk about so I can't check).

As tilly points out, by keeping the attribute and method syntax identical we're free to change our implementation without having to change the API.

In reply to Re^6: This is why I use Perl by adrianh
in thread This is why I use Perl by pg

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