Re^2: What operator should perl5porters use for safe dereferencing?

[pemungkah]

Yes, and that's an alternative that's been proposed (by me and independently by others). The consensus is that it could be done using autobox. That's my personal preference, with the option to turn off a warning for it:

  $z = $not_defined->arbitrarymethod()
  Method not called at ...

I personally think that's preferable to a whole new operator; the idea is to make it work in much the same way that sending messages to nil does in Objective-C: it does nothing, and returns nil (which equivalences to 0 in numeric context). For Perl, it'd do nothing and return undef (in list context it'd return an empty list).