In the specific case the visibility of member variables (hash elements) of stock Perl objects, yes, they are visible. Is this a problem? It comes down to a matter of trust. If you trust yourself and your team to not abuse the feature, I'll argue, (based on experience with two substantial perl-based applications, one in the 600KLOC range) that visibility isn't an issue worth the cost of the various workarounds.

For me the issue isn't trust. The problems I've had are not due to deliberate fiddling with member variables - they're to do with accidental ones. People having subclasses break when new superclasses are released by different teams because instance variables or private methods clash, etc.

So yes, for me, it has occasionally been quite a significant issue - and solutions like Class::InsideOut look like a nice low cost way to avoid it in the future.

In reply to Re^2: Perl 5 OOP solutions by adrianh
in thread Perl 5 OOP solutions by tomazos

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