perl-Devel-EnforceEncapsulation

Encapsulation is the practice of creating subroutines to access the properties of a class instead of accessing those properties directly. The advantage of good encapsulation is that the author is permitted to change the internal implementation of a class without breaking its usage. Object-oriented programming in Perl is most commonly implemented via blessed hashes. This practice makes it easy for users of a class to violate encapsulation by simply accessing the hash values directly. Although less common, the same applies to classes implemented via blessed arrays, scalars, filehandles, etc. This module is a hack to block those direct accesses. If you try to access a hash value of an object from its own class, or a superclass or subclass, all goes well. If you try to access a hash value from any other package, an exception is thrown. The same applies to the scalar value of a blessed scalar, entry in a blessed array, etc. To be clear: this class is NOT intended for strict enforcement of encapsulation. If you want bullet-proof encapsulation, use inside-out objects or the like. Instead, this module is intended to be a development or debugging aid in catching places where direct access is used against classes implemented as blessed hashes. To repeat: the encapsulation enforced here is a hack and is easily circumvented. Please use this module for good (finding bugs), not evil (making life harder for downstream developers).

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