To add a different spin on the good answers already here, the call:

    my $object = bless($reference, "MyClass");
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does something like this:

    sub bless {
      my ($reference, $class) = @_;
      $reference->{class_name} = $class;
      return $reference;
    }
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and then whenever Perl sees something like this:

    $object->some_function($arg1);
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it transforms it into this:

    $object->{class_name}::some_function($object, $arg1);
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which in this case would translate into:

    MyClass::some_function($object, $arg1);
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There's a little more to it than that, to support inheritance and such, but that's the general idea.