http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=434407

crenz has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

For years now, I've been using something like this as my default constructor:

sub new { my $class = shift; my %params = @_; my $self = {}; foreach (qw(param1 param2 param3)) { $self->{$_} = $params{$_} } # further initialization. # ... bless $self, $class; }

Now I'm transitioning to using fields, as I quite like the idea and it's been in core since 5.6.1. The documentation for fields suggests something like this:

use fields qw(param1 param2 param3); sub new { my ClassName $self = shift; unless (ref $self) { $self = fields::new($self); } # initialization # ... return $self; }

So, my questions are: Is bless $self, $class being phased out in favour of the my HardCodedClassName $self form? Are there any benefits to this? Will inheritance still work even despite the hard coded class name?

Update: Sorry, I saw that for subclasses, fields still recommends the my $class = shift form. So I don't need to bless $self, class anymore, since fields does that for me, but I don't have to specify the class name in the code.