What the other AM means is that it is possible to determine which subroutines are available to classes (including the AUTOLOAD routine) *without* the class getting a chance to modify itself (or some code to modify the class). There's no need to call a method to find out whether it is defined. However, you cannot find out what is dealt with by AUTOLOAD (well, technically, if there's an AUTOLOAD, *anything* is dealt with, even if dealing with means not doing anything - if there's an AUTOLOAD, you won't get a perl generated "Can't locate object method" error for that class.