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Mastering Modern Perl: Writing Efficient and Maintainable Code

Drawbacks of AUTOLOAD

Understand the drawbacks of Perl's AUTOLOAD function, including how it can cause method detection errors, unintentional autoloading, and conflicts in inheritance. Learn why simpler, explicit method declarations improve code reliability and maintainability in Perl programming.

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AUTOLOAD() can be useful, though it’s difficult to use properly. The naïve approach to generating methods at runtime means that the can() method won’t report the right information about the capabilities of objects and classes.

Easiest solution

The easiest solution is to predeclare all functions we plan to AUTOLOAD() with the subs pragma:

Perl
use subs qw( red green blue ochre teal );

Note: Forward ...