Actuall the thing being referenced is blessed; the reference is still just a reference. The blessing changes the referent, not the reference itself. A new reference taken to the same referent will exhibit blessed / object-y behavior.</pedant>

use strict;
{package Foo; sub oik { print "oik\n" } }
my $x = bless [], "Foo";
$x->oik;
our @y;
*y = $x;
( \@y )->oik;
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Zaxo's explanation below shows this as well.

You are absolutely correct. ...it's a concept I understand but have difficulty expressing clearly, especially in a layman vocabulary. Good job with the linguistic deobfuscation. ;)

I might add, the referent needn't be a hash, a simple scalar, nor an array. It could also be a file handle, a regexp, and even a sub, though I've never figured out a useful purpose to blessing a sub. Now I'm sure someone will follow-up with a brilliant use of this technique. *grin*




Dave

OO: extending a closure object was an example of using a closure as an object base type. The blessed sub is the only possible accessor. It allowed the object to be very opaque, but I didn't see it as enough of a benefit to recommend it.

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Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.

Not brlliant but see Re: How to store CODE ref for a method of accessing the source for a coderef without resorting to B:: trickery (of course it's not perfect since it doesn't preserve closureness, but then that's a hard problem no matter what . . .).

Update: Never mind, that's not blessing the coderef directly it's overloading &{}. I thought I'd done something similar with blessed coderefs. Hrmm . . .