Perl by Example, Fourth Edition

Chapter 15. Those Magic Ties and DBM Stuff

Tying Variables to a Class

Normally when you perform some operation on a variable, such as assigning, changing, or printing the value of the variable, Perl performs the necessary operations on that variable internally. For example, you don’t need a constructor method just to create a variable and assign a value to it, and you don’t have to create access methods to manipulate the variable. The assignment statement $x=5; doesn’t require any tricky semantics. Perl creates the memory location for $x and puts the value 5 in that location.

It is now possible to bind an ordinary variable to a class and provide methods ...