Can I use accessor methods in a constructor? - perl

Question

I am writing a simple Perl module that handles time and date information. Below is a simplified version of the constructor and one of the accessor methods:
package Time;
# Constructor
sub new {
my $class = shift;
my %args = #_;
# Create an empty object
my $self = bless {};
# Get input arguments
my $second = exists $args{'second'} ? $args{'second'} : (localtime)[0];
# Use the accessor to validate and populate object data
$self->second($second);
return $self;
}
# Second accessor
sub second {
my $self = shift;
my $second = shift;
# Input validation
if (defined $second) {
if ($second =~ m{^\d+$} && $second >= 0 && $second <= 59) {
$self->{'second'} = $second;
}
else {
die "'second' must be an integer between 0 and 59!";
}
}
return $self->{'second'};
}
My question is... Is it acceptable to use an accessor in object construction in Perl?
Using the accessor inside of the constructor makes it so I don't need all of the validation code in the constructor itself since the input is validated by the accessor, but is this bad practice?
Is there any reason I would not want to do this?

Answer 1

Yes, you can do that.
But from an OOP perspective it might make sense to move that code into an init method, so the constructor only creates the object. It's basically done after you've called bless.
sub new {
my $class = shift;
# Create an empty object
my $self = bless {};
# initialize the object
$self->init(#_);
return $self;
}
sub init {
my ($self, %args) = #_;
# Get input arguments
my $second = exists $args{'second'} ? $args{'second'} : (localtime)[0];
# Use the accessor to validate and populate object data
$self->second($second);
return;
}
Have you considered using Moose? You can also use Type::Tiny for your type constraints, even if you want to stick with manual oop.