You want to report an error during initialization. Personally, I consider that an error in creating an object should die, returning either an exception object or an error message in $@, according to your preference. This means that you'd have something like (untested): 

package CoolObject;
sub new {
  my $class = shift;
  my $self = { name => 'new' }, $class;
  $self->loaddata() or die 'Error loading data';
  return $self;

[download]

and call it like

my $co = CoolObject->new();
# or if you want to trap the error...
my $co = eval { CoolObject->new() };
if ($@) {
  # do something about the error
}

[download]

In reply to Re: How do I report an error back to the user of my object? by thargas
in thread How do I report an error back to the user of my object? by SomeNetworkGuy

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