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Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2017 14:27:08 -0400
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To: Levi Morrison <levim@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: pollita@php.net (Sara Golemon)

On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 12:02 PM, Levi Morrison <levim@php.net> wrote:
> 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.
>
Except that we don't actually support case-insensitive constants and
never have.  We support ASCII case-insensitivity.  Of course, this
supports your "let's drop case insensitivity" position on the grounds
that our implementation of it is ironically parochial and terrible.

The argument about Turkish becomes irrelevant though since any
constant declared with a non-english identifier is (at least
partially) forced to be case-sensitive by virtue of our non-localized
tolower implementation.

https://3v4l.org/Od03d

-Sara