[oak perl] Lexical vs. Package variables

[Belden Lyman]

On Wed, 2005-02-09 at 13:13, Sandy Santra wrote:
> More complicated, yes.  But I need to be able to enlarge my thinking so I 
> can grasp more complicated programming models.  I can't believe I'm still 
> having a hard time "getting" object-oriented programming. So many people
> are programming Java!

Be fair to yourself.

If you haven't come from a CS background and are trying to teach yourself
about objects, you'll need some time. I'm speaking from experience.

In my experience, objects aren't a hard subject to understand; there's a
mental trick that you need to learn.

Part of getting the trick is to read the right things. perlobj,
perltoot, and perltooc were the only things I knew about when
trying to understand objects. They all went over my head, and each
time I set out on the "I'm gonna learn objects today" trip, I quit
reading them because they're so dense.

Pity, since the very end of perltoot says:

    perlboot is a kinder, gentler introduction to object-oriented
    programming.

perlboot made things click for me. Give it a try. Work through
the examples. Play with your own changes.

You should also learn about references, particularly what this
stuff does:

    my %hash = ( foo => 1, bar => 2 );
    my $href = \%hash;
    print $href->{foo}, "\n" ;

When you get to be writing your own perl objects, you'll be using
the arrow operator (->) a lot.

Belden