Re^2: Method names with colons in them?

Actually, the error message is misleading (the 'def' package is called, not 'def::xyz'--update: the correct error message appears in perl 5.8.4, but not 5.6.1), ~~and AUTOLOAD doesn't get called at all~~. The package called is 'def', ~~and if you comment out the 'sub xyz...', you still get the error (maybe you could consider it a bug...I haven't read the docs lately, though)~~:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

package ABC::XYZ;

use strict;
use warnings;
use vars qw($AUTOLOAD);

sub AUTOLOAD {
  print "package: ", __PACKAGE__, " $AUTOLOAD\n";
}

package def;

use strict;
use warnings;
use vars qw($AUTOLOAD);

sub xyz {
  print "xyz\n";
}

sub AUTOLOAD {
  print "package: ", __PACKAGE__, " $AUTOLOAD\n";
}

package main;

use strict;
use warnings;

my $m = "def::xyz";

ABC::XYZ->$m;
[download]

Updated: If you comment out the 'sub xyz...', AUTOLOAD gets called in package 'def'.

Comment on Re^2: Method names with colons in them? Download Code