Because while a constructor is explicitly called, a destructor is not. Destruction happens automatically via Perl's garbage collection (GC) system, which is a quick but somewhat lazy reference-based GC system. To know what to call, Perl insists that the destructor be named DESTROY. Perl's notion of the right time to call a destructor is not well-defined currently, which is why your destructors should not rely on when they are called.

and also ;)

in really good object-oriented programming languages, the user doesn't care when the destructor is called. It just happens when it's supposed to. In low-level languages without any GC at all, there's no way to depend on this happening at the right time, so the programmer must explicitly call the destructor to clean up memory and state, crossing their fingers that it's the right time to do so. Unlike C++, an object destructor is nearly never needed in Perl, and even when it is, explicit invocation is uncalled for. In the case of our Person class, we don't need a destructor because Perl takes care of simple matters like memory deallocation.

MP