Ummm...to expand on chromatic's remark, Class::Std *does* provide a way to have it generate accessors and mutators on the fly, but neither is done by default.

I'm glad you put quotes around "good" there. Creating accessors and/or mutators is not, per se, good or bad. It may be beneficial to start out with accessors and mutators in place to limit the number of places where the attributes are directly messed with. Doing so gives you the ability to change the storage mechanism without breaking your API, even within the package itself.

I also use "attribute" to include anything that looks like an attribute even if it isn't directly stored as a value (such as radius vs area for the famous circle). It's a Good Thing for the API to blur the distinction between attribute-like things that are computed versus those that are directly stored, as the user of that class has no Need To Know how the data is stored within the object.