Also, I'm very curious as to know wether someone has ever met any situation in which it has been useful or sensible to have part of the data "inside" the object and part of it stored in a package lexical: possibly by still using the object's blessed reference as in index into a hash, or by some other technique...
I do this sometimes. Usually when I want private data and the object to behave in public like its underlying blessed type (eg, keys %$obj). This can be more useful than having special key prefixes or other nonsense - but by Software Engineering standards its pretty poor form. Good for quick n' dirty stuff though ;-)
time was, I could move my arms like a bird and...