When should I use Perl's AUTOLOAD?

Question

In \"Perl Best Practices\" the very first line in the section on AUTOLOAD is:

Don\'t use AUTOLOAD

However all t

Answer 1

I think for a stand alone script this approach is OK. You can create subroutines on the fly to speed up subsequent calls, e.g.:

sub AUTOLOAD {
    (my $name = our $AUTOLOAD) =~ s/.*:://;
    no strict 'refs';  # allow symbolic references

    *$AUTOLOAD = sub { print "$name subroutine called\n" };    
    goto &$AUTOLOAD;   # jump to the new sub
}

Autoloading is tricky when producing inheritance trees.