...and we are both australian... i wonder what that means? ;-)

indeed, i had seen Class::Contract, and while in the desired direction, syntactically, it's a little ugly and deviates too much from my colleague's styles for me to force them to submit to the same style when they use some of my code.

i don't think i'll be completely satisfied until we see what comes of the RFC's for perl6. the repeated calls for more and tighter OO support is sure encouraging... combine this with an OOP-tailored enhanced version of pod a la javadoc for the ultimate in perl API auto-documentation and the world is ours.

it would be a massive victory for the Perl way if one will be able to code OOP in perl as strictly as java (ie with strong typing, exceptions and so forth) with the simple addition of some object pragma -- and then to turn around and write a 10 line text filter to clean up some windows-turkey's excel spreadsheet....... ;-)

thanks for the reply,
j.a.dirty.p.h