@ISA only inherits method calls, not subroutines. If you don't have ->, then @ISA doesn't trigger.

Update: And even the ubiquitous @ISA=qw(Exporter) is an abuse of inheritance and causes problems. All of the modules that inherit from Exporter.pm should be changed to just do: 

*import= \&Exporter::import;

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so that they "inherit" just the one function from Exporter that they want.

[Update: ...but don't run off and do this in your own modules just yet! Complete support for this requires some minor patching of Exporter.pm. Worse, you probably won't notice a problem with your module after you make this change so you'll think you are safe until some user of your module tries "require Your::Module 1.05" (or some other feature of Exporter that doesn't currently work without the inheritance sledge having been applied). ]

This problem has been improved a bit lately by, for example, DynaLoader.pm doing 

*AUTOLOAD = \&AutoLoader::AUTOLOAD;

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instead of inheriting. But I think the documentation for these core modules should be changed to suggest importing the one function you need instead of inheriting willy nilly.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

In reply to (tye)Re: A question of inheritance by tye
in thread A question of inheritance by Adam

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