Another suggestion is to restructure the way you're going about this entire thing.

What it sounds like is that when you instantiate an object, you pre-populate it with a bunch of data, possibly use data the user gives you, then returns the object.

What about doing something like:

sub new {
    my $class = shift;
    my %attributes = @_;

    $class = ref($class) || $class; # Cargo-cult!

    my $self = $class::SUPER->new(@_);

# Finish up here.

    return $self;
}
[download]

If you do it right, this will allow for both attribute and value inheritance.

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.