I think what chromatic means to say is that you can use the subs pragma to avoid the symbol table issue you spoke of in the third from last paragraph. The subs pragma will create stub (no-op) subroutines at compile time which you can then fill in with AUTOLOAD when they are needed.

hmmm maybe only the 'u', 's', 'e', 'b' and ';' keys are working on chromatic's keyboard ????