UPDATE: Oh, I see what you're up to I think. Some function you build once and applicate anwhere. I am also a little surprised your $x->$deref.

Well, that's a bit of common OO syntactical sugar: if $code contains a subref, then in

$object->$code(@args);
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the corresponding sub is called as a method on $object. This is often used to implement callbacks in a way that personally I like:

$object->record( name => 'doit',
                 callback => sub {
                     my $caller=shift;
                     # ...
                 } );
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