Luckily this turns out not to be the case. can returns a reference to the method you're looking for

True ... kinda. It returns a reference to a class method to the appropriate sub, I know this is just playing with semantics, but when I call an object method I expect the caller to passed in to the method (well, in the world of perl at least). If you really wanted can to return an object method reference (or at least my expectation of one :) in that situation then you could use some code I whipped up for diotalevi's Why isn't ->can() curried?.

Update: Elian rightly points out there isn't any difference between class and object methods, which I knew, but didn't write correctly in the node ('class method' ne 'sub in appropriate package'). Basically my point was that can returns a sub reference not a 'method' reference i.e you call it, and it implicitly makes the caller as the first arg in the arg list.
HTH

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broquaint