Good point about the infinte loop thingy, although for my application it's not relevant. It's a pity you can't do

$self->can("SUPER::method_name");
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I suppose I should explain my idea. I'm not doing autloaded accessors or anything like that. Here's a very rough idea of what I'm doing

package UnloadedObject;

use Class::MethodMaker (
  new_hash_init => 'new',
  get_set => [qw( Table Class ID )]
)

sub AUTOLOAD
{
  my $method = $AUTOLOAD;
  $method =~ s/.*:://;

  my $table = $self->Table;
  my $id = $self->ID;
  my $class = $self->Class;

  my $self = $_[0];

  my $sub = $class->can($method) || $class->can("AUTOLOAD");

  die "Can't call $method on $class" unless defined($sub);

  bless $self, $class;
  %$self = ();
  $table->fillFromID($self, $id);

  goto &$sub;
}
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So you pull some object out of your database and it has links to other objects but you obviously don't want to pull those objects out because that would pull out more sub objects and pretty soon, your whole database is in memory. So instead you just leave a "fake" object wherever there would be a sub object and you end up with something like

my $me = $people->getByName("fergal");
my $name = $me->Name; # nothing special
my $boss = $me->Boss; # still nothing special
my $boss_name = $boss->Name; # bang! magic things happen and suddenly 
+$boss has all it's data loaded
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It's actually a little more complicated than that but that's the basic idea. I don't have to worry about AUTOLOAD loops because I'm not looking in the same class.

UpdatedI changed $self to $class in the ->can sutff