Class Interface

Some languages provide a formal syntactic interface to a class's methods, but Perl does not. It relies on you to read the documentation of each class. If you try to call an undefined method on an object, Perl won't complain, but the program will trigger an exception while it's running. Likewise, if you call a method expecting a prime number as its argument with a non-prime one instead, you can't expect the compiler to catch this. (Well, you can expect it all you like, but it's not going to happen.)

Let's suppose you have a well-educated user of your Person class, someone who has read the docs that explain the prescribed interface. Here's how they might use the Person class: 

    use Person;


    $him = Person->new();
    $him->name("Jason");
    $him->age(23);
    $him->peers( "Norbert", "Rhys", "Phineas" );


    push @All_Recs, $him;  # save object in array for later


    printf "%s is %d years old.\n", $him->name, $him->age;
    print "His peers are: ", join(", ", $him->peers), "\n";


    printf "Last rec's name is %s\n", $All_Recs[-1]->name;

As you can see, the user of the class doesn't know (or at least, has no business paying attention to the fact) that the object has one particular implementation or another. The interface to the class and its objects is exclusively via methods, and that's all the user of the class should ever play with.