Next step: autoloadable features

[Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com>]

I've been thinking a little about how to autoload features and it's
occurred to me it would be quite neat to have them marked with a special
character, so that + means feature enabled, - means feature disabled,
and some other character means feature marked for autoloading.  This
means, for example, zmodload -lF of an unloaded module is meaningful if
there are autoloads marked and it gives you a list of them.

I'm not sure how this fits with my vague and somewhat off the wall
feeling that the autoload should remain even when the module is loaded,
so that we can re-autoload the feature if the module is unloaded.
That would suggest that a feature that's enabled but still marked for
autoload should have yet another character, or possibly a combination of
+ and whatever.

Is this reasonable, at least the first bit?  What character should
indicate autoload?  It had better not be alphanumeric and it's easiest
if it doesn't need quoting.  How about "@"?

-- 
Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com>
Web page now at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/p.w.stephenson/