Ah, HA! So I have to dereference $self to a hash then I can treat it as a hash. (DUH! right...)

I've always heard that it is bad practice to access an objects 'private' variables. I know this concept isn't enforced explicitly in Perl, but is there a good way to do this?

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Data::Dumper;

package Obj;

sub new {
    my ($class, @args) = @_;
    my $self = {};
    bless $self, $class;
    $self->init(@args);
    return $self;
}

sub init {
    my ($self, @args) = @_;
    %{$self} = (
        a => 10,
        @args,
    );

    return $self;
}

sub print_val_a {
   my $self = shift;
#   my $FHOUT = shift || "STDOUT";
#   print $FHOUT $self->{'a'} . "\n";
    print $self->{'a'} . "\n";

}

package main;

my $obj1 = Obj->new();
$obj1->print_val_a();

my $obj2 = Obj->new(a => 40);
$obj2->print_val_a();
[download]

(Granted for some reason this: # my $FHOUT = shift || "STDOUT"; # print $FHOUT $self->{'a'} . "\n"; doesn't work as expected ...)

this works but then how do you control output direction? Is there a 'cleaner' way to do this?

and finally, how about destroying objects? according to perlobj, objects are destroyed automagically when they go out of scop, but what if I want to destroy them manually? as far as I can tell, calling a method DESTROY does not automatically destroy it... Is there even any reason to cleanup after your objects?

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