There's no early binding in Perl. All method calls are symbolic lookups at run time. That means the if elsif method does a dispatch as well as a string comparison. Which is what I already said in my first reply on this thread branch.
does seem a bit counter intuative to use a late binding method when you already know the method name. I could defned my solution in so much that if it is implemented in the future, then you automatically get the benefits it brings...
Seems counterintuitive, doesn't it? Unfortunately early binding simply isn't possible in Perl since a) you can add symbols to a package at runtime (think AUTOLOAD tricks) and b) @ISA can be modified anytime. Perl is in general a very highly dynamic language, but that comes at a price..