I think you bring up a very important point about OOP. Perhaps this is the difference between an imperative view and a functional view. Your view, which I'm taking to be the imperative view, might say that we do things with objects. We command them to keep track of a new setting or to tell us about themselves.

In the functional view we would instead say that an object is more of an expert -- an expert at manipulating a specific data structure. We give it the old data structure and ask for a manipulation and it gives us back a new data structure. You could think of each and every method as a function which maps the old datastructure onto the new one. Often functional languages which have objects use this viewpoint, and for me Perl does too.

But thats one of the reasons that perl is so cool... you can look at it either way :)

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.