http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=988498


in reply to What does this mean?

It's a common setter/getter idiom however with an unfortunate chosen method name setID.

'get' attribute: no argument given, so $id is undefined, current value of $self->{_id} is returned

my $id = $obj->setID(); # return current _id
'set' attribute (and 'get' new value at the same time)
my $new_id = $obj->setID( 42 ); # updates and returns new _id 42 # or just: $obj->setID( 42 );

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Re^2: What does this mean?
by tobyink (Canon) on Aug 20, 2012 at 22:24 UTC

    I don't know if it was necessarily intended to act as a getter+setter. It's probably just a setter that happens to include a quick check to prevent people from setting the ID to undef. It happens to also return the current ID, but I'd assume that's just incidental. A method needs to return something; might as well be something vaguely useful.

    perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'