In the Cookbook, it's page 446 "A Warning on Indirect Object Notation" and in OOP it's pp98-101 "Another way to call a constructor".

To summarise, there are two problems with it:

1. The classname in method CLASS must be a bare symbol, a block or a scalar variable. It can't be just any old scalar expression. This can lead to surprising parsing.
2. Perl needs to guess whether the method is, in fact, a method or a function. It can sometimes get this wrong. Particularly if your method has the same name as a function in your main package.

In general it will work fine, but the times that it won't work are so difficult to keep a track of that it's best to never use it. There's no good reason not to use the alternative CLASS->method syntax, so I see it as a good habit to get into.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

Perl Training in the UK <http://www.iterative-software.com>