When I was at YAPC::2006, a talk of chromatic's got me to thinking about a better way of producing inside-out objects. My idea proved troublesome, but here's the interface I wanted:

use Encapsulation;

sub new {
  bless {}, shift;
}

sub foo {
  my $self = shift;
  return $self->{foo} unless @_;
  $self->{foo} = shift;
}

1;
[download]

In other words, I wanted inside-out objects to act like a normal blessed hash. You know, if inside-out objects were that simple, more people would use them. I've stopped using them because they're so painful to me. I was talking about this idea to adrianh and he suggested a different approach than my foolish attempt to use a tied and blessed hash. Then he sent me the code.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

{   package Encapsulate;
    use Scalar::Util;

    BEGIN {
        my $Secrets = {};
        use overload
            '%{}' => sub {
                my $id = Scalar::Util::refaddr( shift );
                my $package = caller;
                return $Secrets->{ $id }->{ $package } ||= {};
            },
            fallback => 1;

        sub DESTROY {
            my $id = Scalar::Util::refaddr( shift );
            delete $Secrets->{ $id };
        };

    }
}

{   package Foo;
    use base qw( Encapsulate );

    sub new {
        my $class = shift;
        return bless {}, $class;
    }

    sub foo {
        my $self = shift;
        $self->{ secret } = shift if @_;
        return $self->{ secret };
    }
}

{   package Bar;
    use base qw( Foo );

    sub bar {
        my $self = shift;
        $self->{ secret } = shift if @_;
        return $self->{ secret };
    }
}

use Test::More tests => 6;

isa_ok my $o = Bar->new, 'Bar';

$o->foo( 42 );
is $o->foo, 42, "can set and get value of Foo's secret";

Bar->new->foo( 24 );
is $o->foo, 42, "different objects get different secrets";

$o->bar( 99 );
is $o->bar, 99, "can set and get value of Bar's secret";

is $o->foo, 42, "secrets of different classes do not interfere";

ok !defined $o->{secret}, 'cannot reach into objects';
[download]

It's not complete (no serialization support, for one thing), but wow, that's pretty easy! So go ahead, shoot holes in this approach.

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