Perl doesn't support a friend relationship between objects, nor does it support private or protected methods. What is usually done for private methods is to prefix the name with an underscore. I occasionally have methods that I think of as friend methods. Meaning that I expect them to be used by a specific object, or an object with a specific responsibility, but I'm not sure if I should make that method public (meaning foo ) or private ( _foo ) or if there's a better convention? is there a convention for friend methods?