4. Class Accessors
Object accessors are a way to abstract access to an object's member variables
(also known as “properties”, “attributes”, “fields”, “slots”, etc.) behind
method
calls. For example we can use $person->age()
to get the age
of $person
and $person->age(21)
or
$person->set_age(21)
to set their age to 21.
Accessors provide several important advantages over accessing the properties of objects directly and this section will serve as an introduction to them.