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Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 22:52:14 +0100
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Subject: Namespaces: Technical proposal
From: oliver.graetz@arcor.de (=?ISO-8859-15?Q?Oliver_Gr=E4tz?=)

Hi folks!

I had some PM discussions about the (presumably premature) death of ":"
as the namespace symbol.

Most people liked this, some liked "::" (which will definetely NOT work)
and then the opinion was very split with a lot of people saying "OK, if
it has to be" to ":::". Some folks even resigned and went for the widely
hated "\". I'll recompile a table later this night with corrected
opinions (don't worry, I have redflagged all vote posts in my Thunderbird).

But now there might be a possibility to go with ":". Jessie will test
this out and I suppose he'll come out with results (hopefully positive).

Here's the idea: When the tokenizer encounters the opening "?" of the
ternary, it DEACTIVATES the namespace operator until the end of the
ternary. This way, all old code will behave as before, nothing will be
broken. Of course, this absolutely requires the use of parentheses if
one absolutely needs to use namespaces inside the ternary. As such cases
will be pretty rare, this is no big drawback. The good thing: no
whitespace magic is needed!

Comments?

OLLi