Calling a class constructor as a function on input arguments

princepawn has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Often one knows beforehand which subclass of base class in which to initialize one's method. However, in my case, I want to call a constructor as a function of the operating system that I am on. My first thought was to use a hash keyed on operating system name and store a reference to the new of each class as the value, ie:

%constructor = (
  'MSWin32' => \&FTP::Session::Win32->new,
  'HPUX'    => \&FTP::Session::HPUX->new
)
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Which brings up an additional question: since I am using an arrow in the above code instead of ::, will the first argument to the new be the package name? And will it only pass arguments if I had used ::? Thanks for any help guys.

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