How to enable dots (.) in subroutine names? - perl

Question

I am working on creating a module with dynamic accessors, using autoloading. The called methods will have one or multiple dots in their names. Usage example:
use MyModule;
my $var=MyModule->a.method.get;
#MyModule::a.method.get() is now defined
It appears that the dots are illegal characters in subroutine names:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
sub mr.s
{
print "OK\n";
}
mr.s();
gives out
Illegal declaration of subroutine main::mr at main.pl line 5
So, how do I enable dots in subroutine names?
I understand, that at least some of the respondents might feel like discouraging usage of autoloading, as well as trying to change what is a legal subroutine name, instead providing examples of better practices. I have nothing against these kinds of answers and don't consider them any less valuable. Still, please try to provide an answer to my original question as well.
EDIT:
To clarify, the end goal is a module, where, when an undefined subroutine is called, it is dynamically defined, based on its name. To implement this I mean to use AUTOLOAD, in a way similar to how it is used in this tutorial.

Answer 1

You are right, that dot's are illegal in subroutine names. This has nothing to do with autoloading, they are just illegal. A dot is used for string concatenation, so your example of
MyModule->a.method.get
would actually be interpreted as
MyModule->a() . method() . get()

Answer 2

You can't do that, not and call them like ordinary methods [*].
Your choices are to abandon the . and use _ or something instead, or to not create accessor subs but instead have a generic get() function that takes an attribute name as a parameter.
( * Footnote: you can create such methods and call them indirectly, like so:
package Foo;
use strict;
use warnings;
BEGIN {
no strict 'refs';
*{'foo.bar'} = sub {
use strict;
return 'foo.bar value';
}
}
package main;
use strict;
use warnings;
my $method = 'foo.bar';
my $value = Foo::->$method;
but that's going to cause way more headache than you want.)

Answer 3

Why are you trying to use Java (or whatever) syntax? In Perl, it's written MyModule->a->get. Use that.
package MyModule;
use strict;
use warnings;
sub AUTOLOAD {
my $self = shift;
my $name = our $AUTOLOAD =~ s/^.*:://r;
my $path = ref($self) ? $self->{path}.".".$name : $name;
if (is_path_method($path)) {
return call_method($path);
} else {
return MyModule->___new(path => $path);
}
}
sub ___new {
my $class = shift;
return bless({ #_ }, $class);
}
sub DESTROY { }
Note that this will fail if try to access a proxied AUTOLOAD, can, DESTROY, DOES, import, isa, ___new or VERSION.
If you can have methods and attributes with the same name, use MyModule->a->get->(), which you can do by overloading &{}.

Answer 4

Per http://perldoc.perl.org/perldata.html#Identifier-parsing, I don't see that 'mr.s' validates as an identifier under either utf8 or non-utf8 source parsing. Thus, it is not a valid subroutine name.