That won't work (in pure Perl) in traditional inside out objects, as the attributes are stored in lexical variables. No code from other files is able to touch it.

But there are other solutions. Accessors are typically very similar, one could generate them with an editor macro.

Editor macros would be a perfect fix for my COBOL Fingers. Thank you for that suggestion, which should have been obvious to me.

At the same time, there's still that Perlish allure of simplifying code which ought to look simple. My macros relieve my fingers, but my eyes still have to grok a lot of line noise.

At the same time, there's still that Perlish allure of simplifying code which ought to look simple.

But simply looking code doesn't exclude repetition, or not using modules. A simple accessor, for instance the one found the OPs post, remains simple, even if repeated several times with just a change in the name of a variable. The human mind is geared towards recognizing patterns - it won't get confused, and a pattern is the opposite of line noise. OTOH, having a module generating the accessor for you will always leave some people with the question what really goes on in the accessor, and they'll have to look at, and understand, the code generating code in the module.

There is also ovid's Class::BuildMethods which does not care how you implement your objects (but can work with the inside out kind), e.g.

package Soldier;
use strict;
 
use Class::BuildMethods 
    'name',
    rank => { default  => 'private' };

 
sub new {
    my $class = shift;
    return bless [] => $class;
}

package main;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
 
my $foo = Soldier->new;
$foo->name('John');
$foo->rank('Major');
printf "name: %s, rank: %s\n", $foo->name, $foo->rank;
print Dumper($foo) . "\n";
[download]

output:

name: John, rank: Major
$VAR1 = bless( [], 'Soldier' );
[download]

Ummm, I like that quite a bit. So my new code would look like this:

   package Games::Traveller::Sophont;
   {
      use Class::BuildMethods qw/
         name 
         longname 
         homeworld 
         star 
         orbit 
         status 
         niche
   ... etc ...
      /;
   
      sub new { bless {}, shift }
      ... etc ...
   }
   1;     

   package My::Purple::Blovinator;
   my $foo = new Games::Traveller::Sophont;
   $foo->name( "Chamaxi" );
   ... etc ...
[download]

Yeah... yeah, I think I like that a lot.