I don't know if it was necessarily intended to act as a getter+setter. It's probably just a setter that happens to include a quick check to prevent people from setting the ID to undef. It happens to also return the current ID, but I'd assume that's just incidental. A method needs to return something; might as well be something vaguely useful.

perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'

In reply to Re^2: What does this mean? by tobyink
in thread What does this mean? by fritz1968

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