A New Way to Write Broken Perl

I called $cls->SUPER::new in a package constructor that was erroneously missing a base class, which issues the helpful diagnostic:

Can't locate object method "new" via package "The::Package::Name" at .../The/Package/Name.pm line 12.

So Perl says it can't find the method at the exact site of the definition, which is weird enough, but the real problem is triggered by the line with the SUPER call.  Once I added the use parent 'The::Parent'; line to the package, everything was fine.

This behavior was observed Perl 5.10.1 as presently available through the repository for CentOS 6.2.