Excellent! And for those who look at the code and are
totally lost, here is a useful hint on how tie works. All
that tie does is allow an object in a class that defines
the right methods to look like a native Perl datatype. The
only thing you have to do is make sure that you are
providing the OO interface that Perl is looking for.
To find out what methods are part of the interface
that Perl knows to look for type "perldoc -f tie". Note
that the documentation here of tie is somewhat
misleading since it documents the
limitations of tie that were in Perl 5.003. For instance
you probably can create a full tied
interface
to an array.
It feels strange the first few times you create an
implementation of a tied class, but it really is not very
hard and it is an excellent example of how encapsulation
can lead to good things later. :-)
