I must say, I don't need it much. But when I do need it, I don't have to think about it. And it's not getting in the way of anything otherwise.

...the method cache is spoiled for _all_ methods, meaning that there could be considerable performance hit from doing it..

Surely that is negligeble if you're calling the same method many times? And if you're not, your program probably doesn't run long. So you won't notice any performance hit.

Not creating a subroutine and keeping it part of the AUTOLOAD routine,. will mean a lot of lookups will have to be done for each method call. Which is certainly a performance hit.

I guess YMMV ;-)

Liz