I (respectfully) disagree with your disagreement.

Do you honestly think, looking at the OP's code, that he would benefit more from using Moose right now than from re-reading perlobj, perlboot, perltoot and perltooc?

Maybe I'm an old fart, but I think that writing your own accessor factory is a rite of passage for every aspiring Perl hacker ...

Maybe I'm an old fart, but I think that writing your own accessor factory is a rite of passage for every aspiring Perl hacker ...

Sure it is, but Moose is so much more then an accessor factory and when it comes to getting real work done why add an object system to your maintenance burden?

You can take eric256's example one step further and make 'tablename' required (meaning you *must* supply a value to the constructor), and set default values for all the other attributes. I also made the grouped attributes "lazy" which means that Moose will not initialize the slot until it absolutely has too.

package DataTable;
use Moose;

has 'tablename' => (is => 'rw', isa => 'Str', required => 1);
has 'columns'   => (is => 'rw', isa => 'ArrayRef[Str]', default => sub
+ {  [] });
has 'indices'   => (is => 'rw', isa => 'HashRef[Str]',  default => sub
+ { +{} });
has 'datatypes' => (is => 'rw', isa => 'ArrayRef[Str]', default => sub
+ {  [] });

has [qw/ lengths decimals signed allownull default usequote /] =>
    (is => 'rw', isa => 'ArrayRef[Int]', lazy => 1, default => sub { [
+] });

1;
[download]

This is not much more code for Moose, but adding it to your example, or the OPs example would start to get really hairy.

And then to take it even one more step further using Moose::Meta::Attribute::Native you can add some delegated behavior to the 'columns' attribute like so:

package DataTable;
use Moose;

has 'tablename' => (is => 'rw', isa => 'Str', required => 1);
has 'columns'   => (
    traits  => [ 'Array'],
    is      => 'rw', 
    isa     => 'ArrayRef[Str]', 
    default => sub { [] },
    handles => {
        'add_column'           => 'push',
        'remove_column_at_idx' => 'delete',
        # ... and many more 
    }
);

# rest of the class snipped off for brevity ...
[download]

This can then be used like this ...

my $dt = DataTable->new;

$db->add_column( 'foo' );
$db->add_column( 'bar' );

# columns is now [ foo, bar ]

$db->remove_column_at_idx( 0 );

# columns is now [ bar ]
[download]

Honestly, would you want to write this into your own accessor generator? Would you want to maintain it? Moose has *thousands* of tests to make sure stuff like this Just Works.
-stvn

Do you honestly think, looking at the OP's code, that he would benefit more from using Moose right now than from re-reading perlobj, perlboot, perltoot and perltooc?

Unless the OP wants to write a new implementation of an object system, I do. (I suspect most people using objects in Perl 5 do so because they have some project to finish, not because they want to understand how an object system works or the syntax for Perl 5 metaprogramming.)

Depends on the coders goal.

package DataTable;
use Moose;

has 'tablename' => (is => 'rw', isa => 'Str');
has 'columns'   => (is => 'rw', isa => 'ArrayRef[Str]');
has 'indices'   => (is => 'rw', isa => 'HashRef[Str]');
has 'datatypes' => (is => 'rw', isa => 'ArrayRef[Str]');
has 'lengths'   => (is => 'rw', isa => 'ArrayRef[Int]');
has 'decimals'  => (is => 'rw', isa => 'ArrayRef[Int]');
has 'signed'    => (is => 'rw', isa => 'ArrayRef[Int]');
has 'allownull' => (is => 'rw', isa => 'ArrayRef[Int]');
has 'default'   => (is => 'rw', isa => 'ArrayRef[Int]');
has 'usequote'  => (is => 'rw', isa => 'ArrayRef[Int]');

1;
[download]

Thats a lot of simplification right there. And I wouldn't be surprised to find that there might be a short cut to creating a bunch of attributes with the same definition.


___________
Eric Hodges

I can think of a simple way to put it. When someone's coding class method generators, it's time to point them in another direction.
What this guy's talking about is not simple OO. It's great to do this- write your own accessor generator- I've done this a few times. Awesome- learned a ton- but really.. I wouldn't say that writing a class construction helper is part of knowing how to write a class! :-)