I have had problems with it under 5.005: it did not like the sub, although it looked OK and was compiled without a hitch in 5.6.0 and above. So yes the construct works but it looks to me like what you put in the sub can be a problem.

Here is what caused the problem:

my( $text_method, $nav); # actually defined and initialized earlier 
{ no strict 'refs';
  my ${text_method}= sub { my $elt=shift;
                           my $dest= $elt->$nav( @_) or return '';
                           return $dest->text;
                         }
}
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