There are a couple of other ways to get around this. If you're comfortable mucking about in the symbol table, you can generate your subroutines from a template (especially the "do some checks here" code) and eval() them into being the first time they're needed. I'd do that in a BEGIN block, perhaps. Another option is, of course, delegation -- probably the best approach.

You could also fake inheritance, by not using @ISA, and hard-coding calls to the parent. That would allow you to use AUTOLOAD to generate them. You could even write a dispatcher method, to do all the checks for you, then find the appropriate subroutine. You'd have to pass the name of a method you want, and you could use a hash of sub refs to avoid symbolic references. That's not a bad solution.

But there's no way I'm aware of to call AUTOLOAD before checking the inheritance tree. Code provided for any of these examples if you're really curious.