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autouse(3pm)                          Perl Programmers Reference Guide                          autouse(3pm)



NAME
       autouse - postpone load of modules until a function is used

SYNOPSIS
         use autouse 'Carp' => qw(carp croak);
         carp "this carp was predeclared and autoused ";

DESCRIPTION
       If the module "Module" is already loaded, then the declaration

         use autouse 'Module' => qw(func1 func2($;$));

       is equivalent to

         use Module qw(func1 func2);

       if "Module" defines func2() with prototype "($;$)", and func1() has no prototypes.  (At least if
       "Module" uses "Exporter"'s "import", otherwise it is a fatal error.)

       If the module "Module" is not loaded yet, then the above declaration declares functions func1() and
       func2() in the current package.  When these functions are called, they load the package "Module" if
       needed, and substitute themselves with the correct definitions.

WARNING
       Using "autouse" will move important steps of your program's execution from compile time to runtime.
       This can

          Break the execution of your program if the module you "autouse"d has some initialization which it
           expects to be done early.

          hide bugs in your code since important checks (like correctness of prototypes) is moved from com-pile compile
           pile time to runtime.  In particular, if the prototype you specified on "autouse" line is wrong,
           you will not find it out until the corresponding function is executed.  This will be very unfor-tunate unfortunate
           tunate for functions which are not always called (note that for such functions "autouse"ing gives
           biggest win, for a workaround see below).

       To alleviate the second problem (partially) it is advised to write your scripts like this:

         use Module;
         use autouse Module => qw(carp($) croak(&$));
         carp "this carp was predeclared and autoused ";

       The first line ensures that the errors in your argument specification are found early.  When you ship
       your application you should comment out the first line, since it makes the second one useless.

AUTHOR
       Ilya Zakharevich (ilya@math.ohio-state.edu)

SEE ALSO
       perl(1).



perl v5.8.8                                      2001-09-21                                     autouse(3pm)