The temptation is to let Perl do everything it can, which can include disregard OO best practices, so you have a choice what OO practices to apply. For me accessor and mutator processes clarify the relationship of data in a method, so to have an Autoload function is almost self-defeating, it says I want the advantages of accessors and mutators, but.. I'm not going to write them. (I like Autoload for this reason, and this dichotomy is why I posted this, I need help %^)

There is a really cool implementation of an OO Autoload with a list of valid attributes etc which I like.

OK, I know I didn't mention Mr Conway's exceedingly good book in this node, but I was guessing, people might start getting bored of me singing it's praises.

As for Ruby, I've got it on my machine, but I am still toying with Perl. I think if I really wanted to do OO for OO's sake I'd go with Eiffel or Smalltalk before Ruby.