I was seriously confused about this. After a bit of debugging I figured it out though. Here is a simple example that shows what is going on: 
my $test = sub {bless {}};
$test->();
$test->();
$test->();

sub DESTROY {
  print "Calling DESTROY\n";
  die "But you won't see this message\n";
}

[download]
See it?

DESTROY is called in an eval. Since my code was only putting out output within a confess, that output was trapped. So I saw nothing, the script kept on going, and I thought that DESTROY wasn't being called. When in fact it is...

Mystery solved. :-)

In reply to Re (tilly) 3: Reverse Inheritance Irritance by tilly
in thread Reverse Inheritance Irritance by deprecated

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