Note that many people who have used OO programming for a very long time (starting with merlyn who has been using it since the early 80's) detest the use of ref there. Object methods and instance methods are different, no need to confuse them. That said I would write the above as: 
sub new {
  my $self = bless {}, shift;
  @$self{'PEERS', 'NAME', 'AGE'} = [];
  return $self;
}

[download]
which looks cleaner to my eyes. YMMV.

In reply to Re (tilly) 2: What does the SHIFT bit do in a constructor by tilly
in thread What does the SHIFT bit do in a constructor by Fian

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