Heh, well, yes, you certainly aren't alone in your feeling about that ;) I guess me writing it as "new Object" instead of "Object->new()" is a leftover from my C++ days and from the fact that I (apparently) am a Java developer now :-/ (which, one of these days, I'm going to write a nice meditation on the comparitive differences between the two ... I have to admit, I like Java... it makes OO programming in perl seem very clunky).