note Abigail-II <blockquote><em> Are there any weaknesses? </em></blockquote> <ul> <li>As was pointed out, you need to take care of possibility someone subclass will implement stringification overload. A solution was proposed - alternatively, you can document that it's forbidden for a subclass to overload stringification if you don't want to pay the penalty. I think this isn't a major issue; overloading is used, but most objects don't. <li>You have to write a DESTROY method. You can't say that you can live with the memory leak - Perl does not garantee that if you create a reference, let it go out of scope, and then create a new reference, the new one will not have the same address as the first one. <li>Serialization might be a bit harder in some cases. But calling Serialize or Date::Dumper on an object won't work in general anyway. An object might have a reference to something, and a general serialization function cannot know whether the reference needs to be shared with something else. <li>You can't use the standard Class::MethodMaker. But that doesn't mean you can't have a module giving you the same functionality. I've written a proof of concept Class::MethodMaker::InsideOut (not released) giving the same functionality as Class::MethodMaker for Inside Out objects. It'll can even do the DESTROY function and the declaration of hashes. It's using a source filter. Alternatively, you could use <code>our</code> to declare the attribute hashes, and write a module with the same functionality as Class::MethodMaker. <li>If you have a large class, you may want to split it over more than one file. If your attribute hashes are lexical, this will not work. Again, you could use a source filter to merge the files, or declare the attribute hashes with <code>our</code>. </ul> Just in case you are saying that making the attribute hashes package variables makes that someone else can access your attributes, that's ok. I'm not advocating my technique such that you cannot get to the attributes, I want to prevent <em>accidents</em>. After all: "It would prefer that you stayed out of its living room because you weren't invited, not because it has a shotgun." </ol> <p> Abigail 218778 219397