Wow, that's quite a knee-jerk reaction there.

Much more important, IMO, is all of the manipulations of $self followed by return {}, $class; (throwing the modified $self away) or that $obj->new() modifies $obj or that 'use strict' only appears in the POD and some serious errors would be caught by its use.

Steve, I'm guessing that the code you were using was a bit different than this (because I don't believe this code will set $width to anything but undef and so won't have much effect). Perhaps you wanted to 'dress it up' more like a complete module before posting it?

The heart of the code looks good and useful. Thanks for posting it. And don't feel too bad about a few mistakes; we all make lots of mistakes.

If you have any questions about the problems I outlined above, please reply and ask them.