perlboot - Beginner's Object-Oriented Tutorial
If you're not familiar with objects from other languages, some of the other Perl object documentation may be a little daunting, such as perlobj, a basic reference in using objects, and perltoot, which introduces readers to the peculiarities of Perl's object system in a tutorial way.
So, let's take a different approach, presuming no prior object experience. It helps if you know about subroutines (perlsub), references (perlref et. seq.), and packages (perlmod), so become familiar with those first if you haven't already.
Let's let the animals talk for a moment:
This results in:
- a Cow goes moooo!
- a Horse goes neigh!
- a Sheep goes baaaah!
Nothing spectacular here. Simple subroutines, albeit from separate packages, and called using the full package name. So let's create an entire pasture:
- # Cow::speak, Horse::speak, Sheep::speak as before
- @pasture = qw(Cow Cow Horse Sheep Sheep);
- foreach $animal (@pasture) {
- &{$animal."::speak"};
- }
This results in:
- a Cow goes moooo!
- a Cow goes moooo!
- a Horse goes neigh!
- a Sheep goes baaaah!
- a Sheep goes baaaah!
Wow. That symbolic coderef de-referencing there is pretty nasty.
We're counting on no strict subs
mode, certainly not recommended
for larger programs. And why was that necessary? Because the name of
the package seems to be inseparable from the name of the subroutine we
want to invoke within that package.
Or is it?
For now, let's say that Class->method
invokes subroutine
method
in package Class
. (Here, "Class" is used in its
"category" meaning, not its "scholastic" meaning.) That's not
completely accurate, but we'll do this one step at a time. Now let's
use it like so:
- # Cow::speak, Horse::speak, Sheep::speak as before
- Cow->speak;
- Horse->speak;
- Sheep->speak;
And once again, this results in:
- a Cow goes moooo!
- a Horse goes neigh!
- a Sheep goes baaaah!
That's not fun yet. Same number of characters, all constant, no variables. But yet, the parts are separable now. Watch:
- $a = "Cow";
- $a->speak; # invokes Cow->speak
Ahh! Now that the package name has been parted from the subroutine
name, we can use a variable package name. And this time, we've got
something that works even when use strict refs
is enabled.
Let's take that new arrow invocation and put it back in the barnyard example:
There! Now we have the animals all talking, and safely at that, without the use of symbolic coderefs.
But look at all that common code. Each of the speak
routines has a
similar structure: a print operator and a string that contains
common text, except for two of the words. It'd be nice if we could
factor out the commonality, in case we decide later to change it all
to says
instead of goes
.
And we actually have a way of doing that without much fuss, but we have to hear a bit more about what the method invocation arrow is actually doing for us.
The invocation of:
- Class->method(@args)
attempts to invoke subroutine Class::method
as:
- Class::method("Class", @args);
(If the subroutine can't be found, "inheritance" kicks in, but we'll
get to that later.) This means that we get the class name as the
first parameter (the only parameter, if no arguments are given). So
we can rewrite the Sheep
speaking subroutine as:
And the other two animals come out similarly:
In each case, $class
will get the value appropriate for that
subroutine. But once again, we have a lot of similar structure. Can
we factor that out even further? Yes, by calling another method in
the same class.
Let's call out from speak
to a helper method called sound
.
This method provides the constant text for the sound itself.
Now, when we call Cow->speak
, we get a $class
of Cow
in
speak
. This in turn selects the Cow->sound
method, which
returns moooo
. But how different would this be for the Horse
?
Only the name of the package and the specific sound change. So can we
somehow share the definition for speak
between the Cow and the
Horse? Yes, with inheritance!
We'll define a common subroutine package called Animal
, with the
definition for speak
:
Then, for each animal, we say it "inherits" from Animal
, along
with the animal-specific sound:
Note the added @ISA
array. We'll get to that in a minute.
But what happens when we invoke Cow->speak
now?
First, Perl constructs the argument list. In this case, it's just
Cow
. Then Perl looks for Cow::speak
. But that's not there, so
Perl checks for the inheritance array @Cow::ISA
. It's there,
and contains the single name Animal
.
Perl next checks for speak
inside Animal
instead, as in
Animal::speak
. And that's found, so Perl invokes that subroutine
with the already frozen argument list.
Inside the Animal::speak
subroutine, $class
becomes Cow
(the
first argument). So when we get to the step of invoking
$class->sound
, it'll be looking for Cow->sound
, which
gets it on the first try without looking at @ISA
. Success!
This magical @ISA
variable (pronounced "is a" not "ice-uh"), has
declared that Cow
"is a" Animal
. Note that it's an array,
not a simple single value, because on rare occasions, it makes sense
to have more than one parent class searched for the missing methods.
If Animal
also had an @ISA
, then we'd check there too. The
search is recursive, depth-first, left-to-right in each @ISA
.
Typically, each @ISA
has only one element (multiple elements means
multiple inheritance and multiple headaches), so we get a nice tree of
inheritance.
When we turn on use strict
, we'll get complaints on @ISA
, since
it's not a variable containing an explicit package name, nor is it a
lexical ("my") variable. We can't make it a lexical variable though
(it has to belong to the package to be found by the inheritance mechanism),
so there's a couple of straightforward ways to handle that.
The easiest is to just spell the package name out:
- @Cow::ISA = qw(Animal);
Or allow it as an implicitly named package variable:
- package Cow;
- use vars qw(@ISA);
- @ISA = qw(Animal);
If you're bringing in the class from outside, via an object-oriented module, you change:
into just:
- package Cow;
- use base qw(Animal);
And that's pretty darn compact.
Let's add a mouse, which can barely be heard:
which results in:
- a Mouse goes squeak!
- [but you can barely hear it!]
Here, Mouse
has its own speaking routine, so Mouse->speak
doesn't immediately invoke Animal->speak
. This is known as
"overriding". In fact, we didn't even need to say that a Mouse
was
an Animal
at all, since all of the methods needed for speak
are
completely defined with Mouse
.
But we've now duplicated some of the code from Animal->speak
,
and this can once again be a maintenance headache. So, can we avoid
that? Can we say somehow that a Mouse
does everything any other
Animal
does, but add in the extra comment? Sure!
First, we can invoke the Animal::speak
method directly:
Note that we have to include the $class
parameter (almost surely
the value of "Mouse"
) as the first parameter to Animal::speak
,
since we've stopped using the method arrow. Why did we stop? Well,
if we invoke Animal->speak
there, the first parameter to the
method will be "Animal"
not "Mouse"
, and when time comes for it
to call for the sound
, it won't have the right class to come back
to this package.
Invoking Animal::speak
directly is a mess, however. What if
Animal::speak
didn't exist before, and was being inherited from a
class mentioned in @Animal::ISA
? Because we are no longer using
the method arrow, we get one and only one chance to hit the right
subroutine.
Also note that the Animal
classname is now hardwired into the
subroutine selection. This is a mess if someone maintains the code,
changing @ISA
for <Mouse> and didn't notice Animal
there in
speak
. So, this is probably not the right way to go.
A better solution is to tell Perl to search from a higher place in the inheritance chain:
Ahh. This works. Using this syntax, we start with Animal
to find
speak
, and use all of Animal
's inheritance chain if not found
immediately. And yet the first parameter will be $class
, so the
found speak
method will get Mouse
as its first entry, and
eventually work its way back to Mouse::sound
for the details.
But this isn't the best solution. We still have to keep the @ISA
and the initial search package coordinated. Worse, if Mouse
had
multiple entries in @ISA
, we wouldn't necessarily know which one
had actually defined speak
. So, is there an even better way?
By changing the Animal
class to the SUPER
class in that
invocation, we get a search of all of our super classes (classes
listed in @ISA
) automatically:
So, SUPER::speak
means look in the current package's @ISA
for
speak
, invoking the first one found. Note that it does not look in
the @ISA
of $class
.
So far, we've seen the method arrow syntax:
- Class->method(@args);
or the equivalent:
- $a = "Class";
- $a->method(@args);
which constructs an argument list of:
- ("Class", @args)
and attempts to invoke
- Class::method("Class", @Args);
However, if Class::method
is not found, then @Class::ISA
is examined
(recursively) to locate a package that does indeed contain method
,
and that subroutine is invoked instead.
Using this simple syntax, we have class methods, (multiple) inheritance, overriding, and extending. Using just what we've seen so far, we've been able to factor out common code, and provide a nice way to reuse implementations with variations. This is at the core of what objects provide, but objects also provide instance data, which we haven't even begun to cover.
Let's start with the code for the Animal
class
and the Horse
class:
This lets us invoke Horse->speak
to ripple upward to
Animal::speak
, calling back to Horse::sound
to get the specific
sound, and the output of:
- a Horse goes neigh!
But all of our Horse objects would have to be absolutely identical. If I add a subroutine, all horses automatically share it. That's great for making horses the same, but how do we capture the distinctions about an individual horse? For example, suppose I want to give my first horse a name. There's got to be a way to keep its name separate from the other horses.
We can do that by drawing a new distinction, called an "instance". An "instance" is generally created by a class. In Perl, any reference can be an instance, so let's start with the simplest reference that can hold a horse's name: a scalar reference.
So now $talking
is a reference to what will be the instance-specific
data (the name). The final step in turning this into a real instance
is with a special operator called bless:
- bless $talking, Horse;
This operator stores information about the package named Horse
into
the thing pointed at by the reference. At this point, we say
$talking
is an instance of Horse
. That is, it's a specific
horse. The reference is otherwise unchanged, and can still be used
with traditional dereferencing operators.
The method arrow can be used on instances, as well as names of
packages (classes). So, let's get the sound that $talking
makes:
- my $noise = $talking->sound;
To invoke sound
, Perl first notes that $talking
is a blessed
reference (and thus an instance). It then constructs an argument
list, in this case from just ($talking)
. (Later we'll see that
arguments will take their place following the instance variable,
just like with classes.)
Now for the fun part: Perl takes the class in which the instance was
blessed, in this case Horse
, and uses that to locate the subroutine
to invoke the method. In this case, Horse::sound
is found directly
(without using inheritance), yielding the final subroutine invocation:
- Horse::sound($talking)
Note that the first parameter here is still the instance, not the name
of the class as before. We'll get neigh
as the return value, and
that'll end up as the $noise
variable above.
If Horse::sound had not been found, we'd be wandering up the
@Horse::ISA
list to try to find the method in one of the
superclasses, just as for a class method. The only difference between
a class method and an instance method is whether the first parameter
is an instance (a blessed reference) or a class name (a string).
Because we get the instance as the first parameter, we can now access the instance-specific data. In this case, let's add a way to get at the name:
Now we call for the name:
- print $talking->name, " says ", $talking->sound, "\n";
Inside Horse::name
, the @_
array contains just $talking
,
which the shift stores into $self
. (It's traditional to shift
the first parameter off into a variable named $self
for instance
methods, so stay with that unless you have strong reasons otherwise.)
Then, $self
gets de-referenced as a scalar ref, yielding Mr. Ed
,
and we're done with that. The result is:
- Mr. Ed says neigh.
Of course, if we constructed all of our horses by hand, we'd most likely make mistakes from time to time. We're also violating one of the properties of object-oriented programming, in that the "inside guts" of a Horse are visible. That's good if you're a veterinarian, but not if you just like to own horses. So, let's let the Horse class build a new horse:
Now with the new named
method, we can build a horse:
- my $talking = Horse->named("Mr. Ed");
Notice we're back to a class method, so the two arguments to
Horse::named
are Horse
and Mr. Ed
. The bless operator
not only blesses $name
, it also returns the reference to $name
,
so that's fine as a return value. And that's how to build a horse.
We've called the constructor named
here, so that it quickly denotes
the constructor's argument as the name for this particular Horse
.
You can use different constructors with different names for different
ways of "giving birth" to the object (like maybe recording its
pedigree or date of birth). However, you'll find that most people
coming to Perl from more limited languages use a single constructor
named new
, with various ways of interpreting the arguments to
new
. Either style is fine, as long as you document your particular
way of giving birth to an object. (And you were going to do that,
right?)
But was there anything specific to Horse
in that method? No. Therefore,
it's also the same recipe for building anything else that inherited from
Animal
, so let's put it there:
Ahh, but what happens if we invoke speak
on an instance?
- my $talking = Horse->named("Mr. Ed");
- $talking->speak;
We get a debugging value:
- a Horse=SCALAR(0xaca42ac) goes neigh!
Why? Because the Animal::speak
routine is expecting a classname as
its first parameter, not an instance. When the instance is passed in,
we'll end up using a blessed scalar reference as a string, and that
shows up as we saw it just now.
All we need is for a method to detect if it is being called on a class
or called on an instance. The most straightforward way is with the
ref operator. This returns a string (the classname) when used on a
blessed reference, and undef when used on a string (like a
classname). Let's modify the name
method first to notice the change:
Here, the ?: operator comes in handy to select either the
dereference or a derived string. Now we can use this with either an
instance or a class. Note that I've changed the first parameter
holder to $either
to show that this is intended:
and now we'll fix speak
to use this:
And since sound
already worked with either a class or an instance,
we're done!
Let's train our animals to eat:
- { package Animal;
- sub named {
- my $class = shift;
- my $name = shift;
- bless \$name, $class;
- }
- sub name {
- my $either = shift;
- ref $either
- ? $$either # it's an instance, return name
- : "an unnamed $either"; # it's a class, return generic
- }
- sub speak {
- my $either = shift;
- print $either->name, " goes ", $either->sound, "\n";
- }
- sub eat {
- my $either = shift;
- my $food = shift;
- print $either->name, " eats $food.\n";
- }
- }
- { package Horse;
- @ISA = qw(Animal);
- sub sound { "neigh" }
- }
- { package Sheep;
- @ISA = qw(Animal);
- sub sound { "baaaah" }
- }
And now try it out:
- my $talking = Horse->named("Mr. Ed");
- $talking->eat("hay");
- Sheep->eat("grass");
which prints:
- Mr. Ed eats hay.
- an unnamed Sheep eats grass.
An instance method with parameters gets invoked with the instance, and then the list of parameters. So that first invocation is like:
- Animal::eat($talking, "hay");
What if an instance needs more data? Most interesting instances are made of many items, each of which can in turn be a reference or even another object. The easiest way to store these is often in a hash. The keys of the hash serve as the names of parts of the object (often called "instance variables" or "member variables"), and the corresponding values are, well, the values.
But how do we turn the horse into a hash? Recall that an object was any blessed reference. We can just as easily make it a blessed hash reference as a blessed scalar reference, as long as everything that looks at the reference is changed accordingly.
Let's make a sheep that has a name and a color:
so $bad->{Name}
has Evil
, and $bad->{Color}
has
black
. But we want to make $bad->name
access the name, and
that's now messed up because it's expecting a scalar reference. Not
to worry, because that's pretty easy to fix up:
And of course named
still builds a scalar sheep, so let's fix that
as well:
What's this default_color
? Well, if named
has only the name,
we still need to set a color, so we'll have a class-specific initial color.
For a sheep, we might define it as white:
And then to keep from having to define one for each additional class,
we'll define a "backstop" method that serves as the "default default",
directly in Animal
:
Now, because name
and named
were the only methods that
referenced the "structure" of the object, the rest of the methods can
remain the same, so speak
still works as before.
But having all our horses be brown would be boring. So let's add a method or two to get and set the color.
Note the alternate way of accessing the arguments: $_[0]
is used
in-place, rather than with a shift. (This saves us a bit of time
for something that may be invoked frequently.) And now we can fix
that color for Mr. Ed:
which results in:
- Mr. Ed is colored black-and-white
So, now we have class methods, constructors, instance methods,
instance data, and even accessors. But that's still just the
beginning of what Perl has to offer. We haven't even begun to talk
about accessors that double as getters and setters, destructors,
indirect object notation, subclasses that add instance data, per-class
data, overloading, "isa" and "can" tests, UNIVERSAL
class, and so
on. That's for the rest of the Perl documentation to cover.
Hopefully, this gets you started, though.
For more information, see perlobj (for all the gritty details about Perl objects, now that you've seen the basics), perltoot (the tutorial for those who already know objects), perltooc (dealing with class data), perlbot (for some more tricks), and books such as Damian Conway's excellent Object Oriented Perl.
Some modules which might prove interesting are Class::Accessor, Class::Class, Class::Contract, Class::Data::Inheritable, Class::MethodMaker and Tie::SecureHash
Copyright (c) 1999, 2000 by Randal L. Schwartz and Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. Permission is hereby granted to distribute this document intact with the Perl distribution, and in accordance with the licenses of the Perl distribution; derived documents must include this copyright notice intact.
Portions of this text have been derived from Perl Training materials originally appearing in the Packages, References, Objects, and Modules course taught by instructors for Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. and used with permission.
Portions of this text have been derived from materials originally appearing in Linux Magazine and used with permission.