You would have been better just avoiding AUTOLOAD and generating your functions at compiletime. Not only will this mean you don't have to write a custom ->can, it means that when someone else is debugging this that they won't be confused by functions that only exist after they have been called, that code analysis tools ( all kinds of things in B:: and Devel:: ) are going to work instead of having to just punt, etc.

You should only be using AUTOLOAD like this if you have a real and quantifiable benefit. I recall some code of BrowserUK's that would be a great candidate for AUTOLOAD. That situation involved some hundreds of packages where only a small fraction would ever be used at one time. This isn't true for any code I've seen anyone else ever post. In fact, BrowserUK's example was the only time I've seen there being any benefit to using AUTOLOAD.

package Dog;

BEGIN {
    my @attributes = qw/ bone /;
    for my $attribute ( @attributes ) {
        no strict 'refs';
        *{"get_$attribute"} = sub { ... };
        *{"set_$attribute"} = sub { ... };
    }
}
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