Hi,

I'm trying to find the best pragmatic approach to import functions on the fly... let me explain.

Say I have a directory called functions which has these files:

array_select.func.php
stat_mediam.func.php
stat_mean.func.php
.....

I would like to: load each individual file (which has a function defined inside) and use it just like an internal php function.. such as array_pop(), array_shift(), etc.

Once I stumbled on a tutorial (which I can't find again now) that compiled user defined functions as part of a PHP installation.. Although that's not a very good solution because on shared/reseller hosting you can't recompile the PHP installation.

I don't want to have conflicts with future versions of PHP / other extensions, i.e. if a function named X by me, is suddenly part of the internal php functions (even though it might not have the same functionality per se) I don't want PHP to throw a fatal error because of this and fail miserably.

So the best method that I can think of is to check if a function is defined, using function_exists(), if so throw a notice so that it's easy to track in the log files, otherwise define the function. However that will probably translate to having a lot of include/require statement in other files where I need such a function, which I don't really like. Or possibly, read the directory and loop over each *.func.php file and include_once. Though I find this a bit ugly.

The question is, have you ever stumbled upon some source code which handled such a case? How was it implemented? Did you ever do something similar? I need as much ideas as possible! :)