Request for Comments: Function autoloading through spl_autoload*

• Version: 1.0
• Date: 2011-08-05
• Author: Ferenc Kovacs tyra3l@gmail.com
• Status: Draftz
• First Published at: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/autofunc

The topic of supporting function autoloading was brought up many times in the past, this RFC tries to introduce a potential implementation which would be consistent with what we have for autoloading classes.

The suggested change would be pretty straigtforward and BC compatible:

• add a fourth optional parameter for spl_autoload_register called $types with the default value of T_CLASS(this would keep the BC)
  • as you would guess, this would work the same way as the $error_types parameter works for set_error_handler: you can specify for which type(s) of missing tokens should be the autoloader called.
• the type for the missing token should be also passed to the $autoload_function callback as a second param.
  • this is needed to be able to handle multiple types of tokens with a common callback.
  • Note that passing more parameter to a function than it has in it's definition is valid, this would be also backward compatible change.

Non yet, but shouldn't be too hard to implement.

• RFC __autodefine

• http://www.mail-archive.com/internals@lists.php.net/msg43983.html
• http://www.mail-archive.com/internals@lists.php.net/msg48986.html
• http://www.mail-archive.com/internals@lists.php.net/msg52287.html
• http://www.mail-archive.com/internals@lists.php.net/msg48820.html