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Date: Sun, 9 Nov 2025 18:55:23 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] RFC: Namespace-Scoped Visibility for Methods and
 Properties
To: Rob Landers <rob@bottled.codes>, Faizan Akram Dar <hello@faizanakram.me>
Cc: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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From: tim@bastelstu.be (=?UTF-8?Q?Tim_D=C3=BCsterhus?=)

Hi

On 11/8/25 21:09, Rob Landers wrote:
> Please remember to bottom post!

And please also remember to cut the quotes to the relevant part instead 
of just full quoting.

> The reason I chose private(namespace) rather than a new keyword is that the semantics are fundamentally a widened form of private.

This is not accurate. As Alexandru also noted, it rather is an 
alternative to `protected`.

As I believe I had also noted for the nested classes RFC, `private` is 
special in that it does affect any other class at all. For all intents 
and purposes it is not visible to the outside and new private symbols 
can be introduced without taking care of possible parent or child classes.

 From what I understand this is different for namespace-visibility as 
suggested in the RFC. Since the method is externally visible, changes to 
the signature affect both external callers and child classes, which need 
to maintain a compatible signature.

In fact it has a rather odd effect on child classes in a different 
namespace in that some methods are just unavailable to them. It is 
probably necessarily to restrict inheriting from classes with 
namespace-restricted symbols to classes from the same namespace (i.e. 
making the class itself namespace-final so to say).

Best regards
Tim Düsterhus