Sorry, I'm such a retard. Mistake copying a method to the constructor. Anyway, to address two things: sorry for the indentation-- i do indent! i was just lazy and typing in from memory. more importantly-- $obj = MyModule::->new; is perfectly valid, although ugly; (pg 316 of Camel has a great bit). Basically, it says that: $obj = MyModule->new; if fine most of the time, but could be confusing if MyModule is the same of a subroutine (unlikely, I know), which would parse as $obj = MyModule()->new();, where the extra :: is guarenteed to parse correctly.