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Mastering Modern Perl: Writing Efficient and Maintainable Code

AUTOLOAD

Explore how Perl's AUTOLOAD function intercepts calls to undefined methods, allowing for dynamic method handling. Understand how to extract method names, delegate calls, and generate code on demand. This lesson helps you write more flexible and efficient object-oriented Perl code using AUTOLOAD techniques.

We'll cover the following...

Calling undeclared functions

Perl doesn’t require us to declare every function before we call it. Perl will happily attempt to call a function even if it doesn’t exist. Consider this program:

Perl
use Modern::Perl;
bake_pie( filling => 'apple' );

When we run it, Perl will throw an exception due to the call to the undefined function bake_pie().

Now, we’ll add a function called AUTOLOAD():

sub AUTOLOAD {}

Now when we run the program, nothing obvious will happen. Perl will call a function named AUTOLOAD() in a package—if it exists—whenever normal dispatch fails. Change the ...