Tilly, your arguments make sense to me, but I'm previously unfamiliar with this UNIVERSAL::can; I've never _heard_ of it before, much less used it. I've certainly heard plenty about AUTOLOAD and understand some of the things it would be useful for, though I've never used AUTOLOAD either. But if I ever needed something AUTOLOAD could provide, I might use AUTOLOAD, and up to this point I would not have even thought about this can thing.

So I guess what I want to hear from the people who are saying that nobody should ever break can is, why is it important for every module to work with can? For example, I have a module that we'll call Net::Server::POP3. At this time, it doesn't use AUTOLOAD and so probably doesn't break can, but for the sake of argument let's say I was contemplating using AUTOLOAD in the next release. Explain to me why it's important for my module to work with can. What important thing will users of my module need but be lacking if it doesn't?