http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=189787


in reply to Naming convention for Object Variables

Put an underscore in front of private methods. Personally I never put an underscore in front of private properties, because I think that all public properties should have accessor methods, or better yet, everything that an object should do should be available using methods.

There are a couple of advantages to doing it that way:

By the way, it is very likely that your 'private' properties are accessible by other code. Don't worry about it, just don't document it.

-- Joost downtime n. The period during which a system is error-free and immune from user input.