Erm.. what do you expect? My naive inspection says ($self, $f1, $f2, $f3, $val) are completely independent.

Do you mean for some of those symbols to be keys in $self? If you wish to define a method, it should be a sub in the namespace where the object is defined.

If you really want to autovivify those keys, test for defined instead of exists.

After Compline,
Zaxo