One of the links inside the page adrianh sent us to was about InsideOut Objects mainly involving use of some cpan classes to get the privacy, very effective. Damian also discusses this in his Perl Best Practices book, it's good reading.
Don
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Comment on Re: OO - best way to have protected methods
Insideout objects are angerous with threads though, due to windows/unix differences -- unless you're real real careful. And Damian may not have warned his readers enough in the book: Threads and fork and CLONE, oh my!.