in reply to Re^4: AUTOLOAD cascade
in thread AUTOLOAD cascade

The difference between all of those is that mucking about with the symbol table has special significance to the interpreter. Of course, this is why we do it. But, I would argue that greater care and thought needs to be put into symbol-table mucking than, say, your own hash-based dispatch table. You have a greater capacity to introduce subtle bugs that you would with a dispatch table, mixins, and the like.

Now, inheritance, symbol importation, mixins, and localising globals are different in my mind because there is an interface for doing this. The code behind the interface is tested, so you're not building it from scratch. Remember the lesson of Netscape.

Being right, does not endow the right to be rude; politeness costs nothing.
Being unknowing, is not the same as being stupid.
Expressing a contrary opinion, whether to the individual or the group, is more often a sign of deeper thought than of cantankerous belligerence.
Do not mistake your goals as the only goals; your opinion as the only opinion; your confidence as correctness. Saying you know better is not the same as explaining you know better.

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom