Every subroutine can be used from the object and externally. There are no private methods/subroutines in Perl.

There is one thing to remember - you cannot (or rather, should not try to) make a subroutine that can act as both, a method and a plain subroutine. No good comes of that.

package My::Class;
sub my_method {
    my ($self,@args) = @_;
    print "@args\n";
};

sub other_method {
    my ($self,@args) = @_;
    $self->my_method('hello');
};

package main;

My::Class->my_method('world');
[download]

> There are no private methods/subroutines in Perl.

Just for completeness, one can easily achieve the effect of "private subs" by using lexical coderefs.

{
  package MyClass;
 
  my $private= sub {
  ...
  };
 
  $private->();           # call as private function
}
[download]

Sorry for nitpicking :)

UPDATE:

and of course

  $self->$private();      # call as private method
[download]

to pass thru $self as first argument.

Cheers Rolf

Thank you Corion, that helped me a lot