In addition to the comments below, not only can you
bless a reference to any string (existing package or not); you may also do so with an existing "oop" module; wishing to bypass the constructor. I will do this when writing in unit tests (and/or mocking), for example - particularly when the construct does nothing special and I wish to focus on a specific methods or two. Note, however; other rules do apply; for example if the package has a
DESTROY method or
AUTOLOAD method defined; these will still get called as you'd normally expect. E.g.,
# bypass constructor, don't care about stuff done in Targeted::Module:
+:new
my $sneaky_instantiation = bless {}, q{Targeted::Module};
# now call any method, e.g., for a unit test
isa_ok q{Targeted::Module}, $sneaky_instantiation;
ok q{expected value} eq $sneaky_instantiation->_internal_method(), q{u
+nit test for _internal_method};