Interesting.

I must confess I have a little trouble discerning the difference between the creation and population of $AUTOLOAD vs. the creation and population of @_ as you describe it. Except that you get an error for trying to use $AUTOLOAD without explicitly declaring it.

And, obviously, it is only used for AUTOLOAD functions. Also, perl doesn't create it for you ... but that's the problem that started this whole talk, how do we know when perl creates it for you.

But I'm no C programmer or system hacker, so I'm probably missing certain nuances ;->

Maybe the answer is that, "within a given package, perl does *not* always need to create $AUTOLOAD, but it does always need to create @_". It's pretty rare to not need @_ but very common to not need $AUTOLOAD.

It just seems weird to me that perl doesn't see sub AUTOLOAD{ and automagically create and localize $AUTOLOAD. Seems arbitrary. Unlike @_ within sub, $AUTOLOAD is *always* populated within sub AUTOLOAD.

Sigh. I don't know why they didn't just make $AUTOLOAD the second param in sub AUTOLOAD, ie my ($self, $autoload) = @_.

My head hurts.

In reply to Re^4: Use of $AUTOLOAD and strict by ryantate
in thread Use of $AUTOLOAD and strict by jira0004

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.