I hope this isn't a dumbass question, cuz I've already wasted 4 hours on it. The question really has nothing to do with AUTOLOADing in general, I've only mentioned it so you'll know why I don't know what the function returns.

I'm attempting to do an AUTOLOAD thing to give my API programmers access to a new feature. I want to do this transparently. So, I came up with this scheme 

    # this is something like the code from my AUTOLOAD
    # if they call the function the old way, we never
    # get in here... if they call the function with
    # _r on the end, it gets here, strips off the _r
    # and calls the old function. :)

    API->use_the_new_way
    
    $return_value = &{ $func }( @_ );

    API->go_back_to_the_old_way

    return $return_value;

[download]

The problem is, sometimes the $func doesn't return a scalar, sometimes it might be a filehandle or a hash or something... I don't even know how to approach this problem, or how to phrase it. ... Unless I get a really good hint, I'll just keep chugging on it...

It occured to me that this might not be the best design in the whole wide world. That doesn't bother me, I still want to know how to do this (even if I never use it for anything).

In reply to uber-reference by jettero

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