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G.7. So Why Do Some Modules Use Objects?

All these details of using objects are definitely enough to make you wonder—is it worth the bother? If you're a module author, writing your module with an object-oriented interface restricts the audience of potential users to those who understand the basic concepts of objects and object values, as well as Perl's syntax for calling methods. Why complicate things by having an object-oriented interface?

A somewhat esoteric answer is that a module has an object-oriented interface because the module's insides are written in an object-oriented style. This article is about the basics of object-oriented interfaces, and it'd be going far afield to explain what object-oriented design is. But the short story is that object-oriented design is just one way of attacking messy problems. It's a way that many programmers find very helpful (and which others happen to find to be far more of a hassle than it's worth, incidentally), and it just happens to show up for you, the module user, as merely the style of interface.



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