In fact the attached patch allows you to stop the AUTOLOAD inheritance with a simple sub AUTOLOAD; Which will currently dies with an undefined subroutine package::AUTOLOAD but with this patch it will die using the name of the sub being called Graham.
--- gv.c.orig Fri Jun 30 14:01:12 2000
+++ gv.c Fri Jul 7 22:52:17 2000
@@ -418,6 +418,9 @@
return Nullgv;
cv = GvCV(gv);
+ if (!CvROOT(cv))
+ return Nullgv;
+
/*
* Inheriting AUTOLOAD for non-methods works ... for now.
*/
