Autoloading namespace constants and functions

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