I differ in my tastes from davorg. Instead I, like merlyn, prefer to keep instance and class methods separate. His opinion is stated more strongly than mine would be, but I would still make new your basic constructor, give your complex constructor from an existing object a more descriptive name, then just call new from within the more complex constructor. Something like this silly little example: 
sub copy {
  my $self = shift;
  my $copy = ref($self)->new(%$self, @_);
  # Do stuff
  return $copy;
}

sub new {
  my $class = shift;
  return bless ({
    NAME => '',
    USERNAME => '',
    # etc
    @_ # allows overriding defaults in the constructor :-)
  }, $class);
}

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In reply to Re (tilly) 1: OO Perl: calling a constructor within a class by tilly
in thread OO Perl: calling a constructor within a class by fx

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