Hi, guys.

The next issue that I found with autobox is that all your hashes and arrays must be references (despite what the POD docs seem to indicate).

Yes, the receiver must be a scalar i.e. (by default) a string, number or reference. If there's somewhere in the docs that makes this unclear or ambiguous, please let me know and I'll fix it. Note that there is a module by Scott Walters, Perl6::Contexts, that allows methods to be called on plain (i.e. non-reference) hashes and arrays.

And then the last problem I have with it is that the pragma is not lexically scoped.

I apologise if I gave that impression. It's always been lexically scoped and works independently of the lexical pragma. There are a bunch of tests that verify its "lexical correctness" in the test suite.

scope1.pl:

01: $| = 1;
02: 
03: sub SCALAR::uc { uc $_[0] }
04: 
05: {
06:     use autobox;
07:     print "hello, world!"->uc;
08: }
09: 
10: print "hello, world!"->uc;
[download]

> perl -l scope1.pl

HELLO, WORLD!

Can't locate object method "uc" via package "hello, world!" (perhaps you forgot to load "hello, world!"?) at scope1.pl line 10.

scope2.pl:

01: $| = 1;
02: 
03: sub SCALAR::uc { uc $_[0] }
04: sub test { $_[0]->uc }
05: 
06: {
07:     use autobox;
08:     print "hello, world!"->uc;
09:     test("hello, world!");
10: }
[download]

> perl -l scope2.pl

HELLO, WORLD!

Can't locate object method "uc" via package "hello, world!" (perhaps you forgot to load "hello, world!"?) at scope2.pl line 4.

scope3.pl:

01: $| = 1;
02: 
03: sub SCALAR::uc { uc $_[0] }
04: 
05: {
06:     use autobox;
07:     print "hello, world!"->uc;
08: 
09:     {
10:         no autobox;
11:         print "hello, world!"->uc;
12:     }
13: }
[download]

> perl -l scope3.pl

HELLO, WORLD!

Can't locate object method "uc" via package "hello, world!" (perhaps you forgot to load "hello, world!"?) at scope3.pl line 11.

At any rate, don't trust my poorly and hastily written emails; trust my poorly and hastily written docs and tests :-)

chocolateboy