Hi, I'm having trouble using SUPER to call an ancestor's constructor. Say i've got an abstract class, Word, and a subclass, Noun, which derives from it, and calls it's parent's constructor, but then takes a few extra parameters. The only way I can get it to work is to create and bless my $self and then call SUPER:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

package Word;
sub new
{    my $classname = shift;
    my $self = {};
    $self->{stem} = shift;
    $self->{english} = shift;
    bless $self, $classname;
    return $self;
}

package Noun;
our @ISA = "Word";
sub new
{    my $classname = shift;
    my $self = {};
    bless $self, $classname;
    $self = $self->SUPER::new(shift, shift);
    $self->{gender} = shift;
    $self->{nom_sg} = shift;
    $self->{gen_sg} = shift;
    return $self;
}

package main;
my $w = new Noun("ai(=m-", "blood", "n", "a", "atos");
print $w->{english};
[download]

This seems very clunky & makes me think it's hardly worth setting up the inheritance. But I know that in Java you can do it in one line, so I bet you can in Perl too? Can anyone suggest an optimised version of the above?