You mean can you make your constructors prototyped so that the correct constructor gets invoked based on the number of parameters you provide, like you might do in C++?

I don't think you can do this in Perl, because Perl's version of prototypes isn't the same as C++'s. Differently-prototyped subroutines with the same name don't fly in Perl. I don't think.

My question would be: are you sure you need to do this? Perhaps there's a better way of handling this in Perl that doesn't require such a thing.

One way to do it would be to pass in the parameters as a hash, then just dump that hash into the hash-reference object that you create:

    package R;

    sub new {
        my $this = shift;
        my $class = ref($this) || $this;

        my $self = { @_ };
        bless $self, $class;
    }
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Now people can create a new R object any way they please:

    my $r1 = new R;
    my $r2 = new R (foo => 'bar');
    my $r3 = new R (baz => 'quux', foo => 'bar');
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and so on. Would that work for you?