I must confess that I was writing some code and I omitted the 'sub' declaration in front of AUTOLOAD. Since it half-way works, it was a pain to troubleshoot. But I was surprised that it worked at all without even a warning. I vaguely recall reading about something similar but I can't find the documentation on it. Can anyone say why? Example: 

use strict;
use warnings;

package Foo;
our $AUTOLOAD;

sub new { return bless {}, shift }
sub do_something { print "did something" }

AUTOLOAD {      # note it's missing the 'sub' declaration
        print "message from Foo: undefined method ($AUTOLOAD) called";
}

package main;

my $instance = Foo->new;

$instance->do_something; # prints "did something"
$instance->do_notimplemented; # prints "message from Foo: undefinded m
+ethod (Foo::do_notimplemented) called

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In reply to Why does this work? AUTOLOAD sans sub declaration by braswell

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