bless attaches a method dispatch table to some Perl data structure. That's not what most people would consider a constructor.

In most programming languages the constructor is some function that gets called once the object has been allocated in memory in order to have its attributes initialized. Setting its method dispatching table is something done by the language runtime under the hood, not inside the constructor.

Perl leaves to the programmer the task of allocating the object storage, setting the dispatch table and initializing the object for greater flexibility.

In my opinion, a constructor in Perl can be any function or code fragment returning a new object in an usable state. For some simple cases, just a bless {}, $class can qualify as such, but the usual thing is to use a method for that and to call it "new".

In reply to Re^5: Perl "new" command by salva
in thread Perl "new" command by akagrawal3

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.