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. */