It's not obvious from the documentation that you can't inherit from XML::DOM::Document. What leads you to think that that is the case?

What are you trying to achieve that you think such inheritance would help with?

  use XML::DOM;
  @ISA = qw( XML::DOM::Document );
[download]

yields:

  Global symbol "@ISA" requires explicit package name at lib/Literally
+/Document.pm
[download]

and

  use XML::DOM::Document;
  @ISA = qw( XML::DOM::Document );
[download]

yields:

  Can't locate XML/DOM/Document.pm in @INC
[download]

I'd like to do the normal thing for which one uses inheritance: extend existing functionality. The particular problem I'm trying to solve involves creating a DOM tree from scratch; while that's not directly related to my desire to use inheritance, it is another thing that the XML::DOM documentation doesn't make obvious (rather, it focuses on operating on a DOM tree constructed with the parser).

Howdy!

The error message from your first snippet simply means that 'strict vars' is in effect, and you haven't told it that @ISA is ok.

use vars qw ( @ISA );
use XML::DOM;
@ISA = qw(XML::DOM::Document);
[download]

should compile fine. The current package will now be a subclass of XML::DOM::Document. Whether that acutally does what you want is a separate problem.
yours,
Michael

Looking at XML-DOM, XML::DOM::Document is a documentation module, consisting of POD only. You cannot inherit anything from in. Try XML::DOM as base class instead.