I'm not sure I like this polymorhic method-naming stuff that'll be happening in the background. Perl is weakly-typed, so why do a work-around that strongly-typed languages have to do? Instead, why not do the following? 
sub new {
    my ($class, $name, $rank, $c_num) = @_;
    $name ||= '';
    $rank ||= '';
    $c_num ||= '';

    bless { name => '',
            rank => '',
            cereal_number => '',
          }, $class;
}

[download]
That, to me, just feels cleaner and is more maintainable. If you make a change in new(), you only have to change it in one place. Especially if it's in a base class. If it's in a base class and you only change one, you suddenly have weird behavior in the grandchild classes and debugging it would take an age-and-a-half. *shudders*

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In reply to Re: Re: OO Perl: calling a constructor within a class by dragonchild
in thread OO Perl: calling a constructor within a class by fx

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