I agree, autoloaded accessor are probably a bad idea but that's not what I was doing. Did you read my comment on what I was actually doing with AUTOLOAD?

Another use I had was an object proxy. Basically you connect to an object server, get an ID from that server, it gets wrapped in an object on the client side which looks like 

package ProxyObject;

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

  return $self->{HomeServer}->call_method($method, $self->{ID}, \@_);
}

[download]
the HomeServer object sends the method, the id and the args back to another server which calls the method on the correct object, passing in the args and then passes the result back across the network.

In use it looked like 


my $server = Server->connect(
  host => auth.domain.com
  user => $user,
  pass => $pass
);

my $root = $server->getRoot; # this is a proxied object
my $users = $root->getUsers; # another proxied object
my $fergal = $users->getUser("fergal");
$fergal->setPasswd("wibble");
$fergal->setShell("/bin/zoidberg");
$fergal->commit;

[download]

Your Perl code neither knows nor cares that some of the objects it's playing with doesn't actually exist on this machine.

In reply to Re: Re: goto and AUTOLOADed methods by fergal
in thread goto and AUTOLOADed methods by fergal

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