I don't think it wouldn't in this instance. We're tracking bug that's due to a naughty subclass breaking encapsulation (direct hash access rather than via methods).

Adding assertions to the base class won't help. That's not where the bug is.

Adding assertions to the subclasses is basically what we're doing - but at runtime not compile time.

The "problem" with perl is that because we don't have proper encapsulation we would have to add the assertions by hand to anything that might fiddle with a Foo object in a naughty manner. Doing this by hand would be a complete PITA. Doing it programmatically using Hook::LexWrap is a breeze.