I think the OP's question is whether he needs to capture the result of bless and return that. In other words, does "bless" actually change the reference. This was explained well in the book "Object Oriented Perl", bless does change the referant, so you do not need to capture the result. You can use ref to inspect the reference:

my $this = {};
print ref $this; # prints HASH
bless $this;
print ref $this; # prints main, or Foo if you used: bless $this, FOO
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