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Subject: Deprecate and remove case-insensitive constants?
From: cmbecker69@gmx.de ("Christoph M. Becker")
Hi everybody!
Usually constant identifiers are treated case-sensitive in PHP. This is
always the case for constants defined via a `const` declaration.
However, define() allows to pass TRUE as third argument to define a
case-insensitive constant. This feature appears to potentially result
in confusion, and also causes bugs as shown in
<https://bugs.php.net/74450>. See an example created by Nikita to see
some probably unexpected behavior: <https://3v4l.org/L6nCp>.
Even if these issues could be resolved, I still think allowing both
case-sensitive and case-insensitive constant identifiers does more harm
than good, so either case-sensitive or case-insensitive constant
identifiers should be removed from the language. Since case-sensitive
constant identifiers are already the default, and HHVM doesn't even
support case-insensitive identifiers at all, I would suggest to remove
case-insensitive constant identifiers.
This could be implemented by triggering E_DEPRECATED whenever the third
argument to define() is TRUE in PHP 7.3, and to remove this parameter
altogether in PHP 8. Most likely some further simplification in the
engine could be done then as well.
Thoughts?
--
Christoph M. Becker