I did look at the source. The idea to look at %EXPORT_TAGS came from the fact that AUTOLOAD looks at %EXPORT_TAGS to decide whether the method called should be created or not (unless you asked it to allow you to create just any method).

There are some methods that aren't created via AUTOLOAD but those are in %EXPORT_TAGS already.

Yes, the special handling of "start" and "end" prefixes isn't covered by this simple trick. There are probably a few other edge cases as well.

                - tye