Is there a reason why you are using that weird syntax instead of the way proposed in the SYNOPSIS section of the documentation ?

package Bar;
use base 'Foo';
use fields qw(baz _Bar_private);        # not shared with Foo
sub new {
  my $class = shift;
  my $self = fields::new($class);
  $self->SUPER::new();                # init base fields
  $self->{baz} = 10;                  # init own fields
  $self->{_Bar_private} = "this is Bar's secret";
  return $self;
}
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Of course, doing it that way means you need to chain to the previous constructor manually, but I didn't see any chaining in your (more generic?) constructor.

Thanks, Corion, you are right, there is not any reason to use the weird syntax. I found it two years ago in the book <a href=;http://www.manning.com/Conway/index.html'>Object Oriented Perl by Damian Conway (in my opinion, that book is one of the best Perl books). Probably, that syntax became old. Unfortunately, using

my $self = fields::new($class);
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intead of

no strict "refs";
my $self = bless [\%{"${caller}::FIELDS"}], $class;
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doen't resolve problem with pseudo-hashes.

---
Michael Stepanov aka nite_man

It's only my opinion and it doesn't have pretensions of absoluteness!

Re-reading the documentation, Perl 5.8.x still uses the pseudo-hash implementation, so I guess you will have to temporarily switch off the warnings for that section of code:

my $self = do {
  no warnings 'deprecated';
  fields::new($class);
};
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