Oh ok fine. I use Shell myself but rarely if ever think of it. So you got me. There are other uses for AUTOLOAD than I mentioned and the ones you mentioned are actually useful. I was thinking of the common use of AUTOLOAD to delay method generation. Its that practice that I see is completely out of whack and that I'm thinking of when I complain about people who use AUTOLOAD.
It also occurs to me that using AUTOLOAD in the way I actually complained about exerts addition runtime penalties that would not normally exist - the entire method cache is invalided whenever the newly generated function is assigned into place.
