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Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2017 10:02:30 -0600
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To: Sara Golemon <pollita@php.net>
Cc: "Christoph M. Becker" <cmbecker69@gmx.de>, "internals@lists.php.net" <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Deprecate and remove case-insensitive constants?
From: levim@php.net (Levi Morrison)

On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 9:38 AM, Sara Golemon <pollita@php.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 8:02 AM, Christoph M. Becker <cmbecker69@gmx.de> wrote:
>> 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>.
>>
> I'd just like to ask everyone on this thread to circle back to the
> actual topic: Case-Insensitive Constants.  Nothing else is on topic
> here.  If you'd like to argue the value of Turkish case folding and
> its impact on combined symbol tables in 40 year old software, I
> encourage you to start a new thread for that topic.
>
> Of the minority of responses to this thread reflecting on the actual
> goal of the proposal, I've seen responses from "sure, why not?" to
> "what's the point?", but if there was a coherent argument firmly
> against, I must have missed it.
>
> So could we focus on the topic at hand, please?

For what it is worth the Turkish locale issue is on-topic. If we have
case sensitivity and case insensitivity simultaneously in constants
and we decide to drop one then the locale issue points towards
dropping case insensitivity.