G'day choroba,

++ That's a very valid point; thanks for raising it. It even applies to the code I'm currently working with, which I paraphrased for this post as:

my $cloned_object = ref($existing_object)->new();
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As I indicated in the OP, I want an object that's of the same class as $existing_object, but I want default values (not whatever values $existing_object has). In fact, if I had taken $existing_object's values, that would've broken my code in all sorts of interesting ways.