I’ve been using Java and Perl both for the past few years and I’ve noticed things that I like about each that I wish the other could do. In Perl, of course, the object oriented syntax is a bit more difficult than in Java. I’ll cut to the chase, I finally figured out how to create a “protected” method in Perl that mimics the functionally of a protected method in Java. Here is the code:

sub protectedMethod {
    die("_get is not a visible method") unless caller->isa(__PACKAGE__);
    my $self = shift;
    #do whatever here....
}