The SUPER Way of Doing Things (Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules)

8.8. The SUPER Way of Doing Things

By changing the Animal class to the SUPER class in that invocation, you get a search of all your superclasses (classes listed in @ISA) automatically:

{ package Animal;
  sub speak {
    my $class = shift;
    print "a $class goes ", $class->sound, "!\n";
  }
}
{ package Mouse;
  @ISA = qw(Animal);
  sub sound { "squeak" }
  sub speak {
    my $class = shift;
    $class->SUPER::speak;
    print "[but you can barely hear it!]\n";
  }
}

Thus, SUPER::speak means to look in the current package's @ISA for speak, invoking the first one found if there's more than one. In this case, you look in the one and only base class, Animal, find Animal::speak, and pass it "Mouse" as its only parameter.