Pardon the tangent, but in Perl 5 what you call the instance of the class is up to you. Conventionally it's $self, and the constructor is often new(), but these can be whatever you want. Unless you use a special CPAN module that does the work for you, the common idiom in declaring methods is
sub method {
my $self = shift;
...
}
You could name it $myself, $this, or even $the_object if you wanted.
