Please see my updated post above.

Also, looking at your particular application of this, I can't quite understand why do you need to worry much about blessed entities (structures). No matter what 'class' name your hash structure has been branded with, in the end you still deal with the same hash structure. The $self variable is simply referencing that 'named' structure. And when you do $self->method(), Perl simply interprets it as FOO::method($self) on the basis that '$self' has been 'labeled' as belonging to the package or being of type 'FOO'. That's all. Nontheless, I can still do this:

package FOO;

sub new {
    bless {
        key1 => 1,
        key2 => 2
        };
}

package main;

my $foo = new FOO();

print "Look, first key = '$foo->{key1}'!\n";
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Output:

Look, first key = '1'!
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Clearly, that $foo object is nothing but a reference to a hash. Simple as that.

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# Under Construction
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