Chapter 3. Object-Oriented Programming in Perl

In Chapter 1, you saw how modules are defined and used, and in Chapter 2, how references and data structures work. Now, it's time to introduce the important concepts and techniques of object-oriented programming in Perl that are based on modules and references.

Object-oriented (OO) programming is one of the most important approaches to writing programs, and it is an approach that has been well supported by Perl for quite a while. Other OO languages of interest include Java, C++, and Smalltalk. Many Perl modules are written in an OO style, and their proper use requires some fundamental understanding of the OO approach. Luckily, the key concepts are fairly simple.

Perl easily supports both declarative and OO programming. (Perl was originally a declarative language only; the OO style was added fairly early on.) Declarative programming is characterized by code that declares variables and subroutines, conditional tests, if-else branches, and loops , and various arithmetic, logical, and string operators. It is up to you to manage the definition and use of the variables and subroutines so that they interact in appropriate ways. (You'll see shortly how object-oriented programming imposes additional constraints that help you create well-behaved programs.) Many declarative programming languages are well established, including Perl and such stalwarts as C, FORTRAN, and BASIC, to name just a few. By this point, assuming you have some experience programming in Perl, you should be fairly comfortable with the declarative style.

The first part of this chapter is an overview of OO programming and how OO Perl modules are used. If you're a beginning Perl programmer, you'll find them easy to use because they rarely require you to know how to write OO Perl code. Depending on your needs and goals, this might be all the information you'll require from this chapter.

As a more advanced programmer, you'll sometimes need to write your own OO bioinformatics software. If you're such a programmer, the second part of this chapter will be of greatest interest to you. However, because the material is developed incrementally, you will most likely want to read the chapter in order from beginning to end.

Perl makes clever and simple use of existing mechanisms to support OO programming. Perl packages and modules are used to define OO classes, Perl references define OO objects, and Perl subroutines define OO methods. The definitions of these terms will become clear as you read the chapter, but in brief, OO software is organized into classes that contain data called objects. Subroutines called methods operate on the objects.

Over the course of this chapter, I'll develop a small example object module, Gene.pm , to demonstrate the essentials of OO Perl. Gene.pm is developed in four stages so you can learn the OO style gradually. The final code for Gene.pm serves as a template from which you can begin developing your own OO software.