In general, I agree with your excellent advice, jbert, except for this minor point:

However, I'd personally do neither of those. The best way these days to declare inheritance is use base, which also has the handly property of being a compile-time construct.

IMO base is a crap module, it tries to handle both loading external files and inline packages, but it tries Too Much Magic™ and in some cases it may fail. It's failed many times for me in the past. I don't trust it any more.

As a result, you may have to reorder the definition for your packages and possible even add a $VERSION variable (in an inline package!). All that to please base. Yuck.

I wish we could bypass the magic, and explicitely tell it to load a module, or just skip that phase.

If it wasn't for that annoyance, base would indeed work very well, for the reasons you give.

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