Actually I do have an empty DESTROY but I did not bother copying it. In my case if there is no DESTROY then the program tries to do stuff on a non-existent CGI::Application reference.

The inheritence question is more interesting. Yes I can see my approach makes no special effort to handle inheritence. But actually I think it would work. Let me put my approach in words.

  1. Avoid AUTOLOAD except where it gives a big gain in loose coupling.
  2. Don't rely on someone else's module. The area is too complicated.
  3. This means you have to craft your own solution, but it is fairly simple.
  5. Define a DESTROY method as bad stuff happens otherwise.
  6. Define a semantically correct "can" function that either returns undef or a CODE ref.
  7. Define the AUTOLOAD function in the fairly standard way based upon the "can" function.
  8. If I were to write a derived class I would either inherit both "can" and "AUTOLOAD" and override less impactful functions; or I would override "can" in the same way and make use of SUPER::can where appropriate.
  9. I avoid multiple inheritence so I would make autoloading in a multiple inheritence scenario an absolute no.

In reply to Re^5: A working strategy to handle AUTOLOAD, can(), and (multiple) inheritance without touching UNIVERSAL? by SilasTheMonk
in thread A working strategy to handle AUTOLOAD, can(), and (multiple) inheritance without touching UNIVERSAL? by lodin

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