yikes, this is a bit over my head, i might go with laziness now and worry about being reusable later... thanks for all your help, ZZAmboni's code seems to work with a bit of tweeking:

 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w 

package PRODUCT;
use Carp; 
use strict;
use vars qw($AUTOLOAD);
   
sub fields {
   return qw(data);
}

sub new { 

 my $product = shift; 
 my $class = ref($product) || $product; 
 my $self={};
 bless $self, $class;
 my %fields;
 @fields{$self->fields}=undef;
 $self->{_permitted} = \%fields;
 
 for(keys %fields){
 $self->{$_}=$fields{$_} 
 
 }
 return $self;

}



 sub AUTOLOAD { 

 my $self = shift; 
 my $type = ref($self)
 or croak "$self is not an object"; 
   
 my $name = $AUTOLOAD; 
 $name =~ s/.*://; #strip fully-qualified portions

 unless (exists $self ->{_permitted} ->{$name} ) { 
     croak "Can't access `$name' field in class $type"; 
 
 } 


if (@_) { 
    return $self->{$name} = shift; 
}else{
    return $self->{$name};    
 }  

 }


sub DESTROY {}

sub pack {
   my $self=shift;
   my $record=join(':', @{$self}{$self->fields});
   return $record;
 }

  







 package SUBPRODUCT;
   use vars qw(@ISA);
   @ISA=qw(PRODUCT);




sub fields {
   return qw(name price description);
}

   1;


</pre>
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(just small syntax stuff) 
 

-justin simoni

!skazat!
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