A few different proposals have mentioned the possibility that import
or use statements might trigger autoload.
My initial reaction is that this would be bad, BUT: it could let us
use autoload to handle namespaced function libraries and namespace
constants also - as long as they were imported. Which would be good.
The missing piece would be allowing autoload to trigger when a
fully-qualified name was used whether that name was for a function,
class, or constant.
In other words, I'd like autoload to kick in when I do this:
<?php
$stuff = My::Namespace::do_stuff();
?>
... but let do_stuff be a function in the My::Namespace namespace, not
a class method of the Namespace class in the My namespace.
Right now as far as I can see autoload will trigger for this
situation, but it will fail because after autoload finishes because
My::Namespace wasn't declared as a class. Same for accessing namespace
constants.
Would it be possible to, after autoload runs, go back to seeing if the
call is now resolvable, rather than assuming that a class had to be
loaded?
To try and fend off any "just don't use autoload" responses, the
reason I want this to work is that if I can organize my libraries in a
way that they are autoloadable, I can leave the decision on how code
should be included up to the top-level application using the library.
I can use an autoloader with development or when building a site, and
then I can start including files explicitly - with no conditional
includes and no _once usage - in a very opcode-cache friendly way,
with no changes to the libraries or the rest of the app. I think
that's a very desirable situation, and namespaces almost get us there
- I just can't make full use of namespaced functions or namespace
constants right now if I want to do it.
-chuck
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