Dan Sugalski wrote in perl.perl6.internals :
>
> In Perl terms, assume we have a method PRE that gets called before
> any method in a class is called, and AUTOLOAD which is called if you
> call a method on a class and that method doesn't exist. Does AUTOLOAD
> have to get called to check for PRE if PRE doesn't exist in a class?
In Perl 5, AUTOLOAD is called for destructors :
$ perl -wle 'sub AUTOLOAD{print $AUTOLOAD};bless{}'
main::DESTROY
While I think this is annoying in most cases, I imagine this may be
useful. And adding an empty destructor to a class is not a huge effort.
The situation is similar for a PRE method. If it's not defined, there's
no error ; if it's not defined but if AUTOLOAD exists, AUTOLOADing is
tried. (I imagine that if AUTOLOAD gracefully refuses to create the PRE
method, no further attempt will be made.)
