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Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2006 12:41:09 -0500
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Namespaces in PHP 6 - ++$take
From: sean@caedmon.net (Sean Coates)

> That's a bit of a circular logic no? There are indeed technical
> challenges to implementing namespaces, these reasons have been covered
> in previous discussions many times, since no adequate solution was
> devised they were never implemented. Once those issues are resolved or
> at the very least solutions are known, we can consider whether or not
> this is something that's truly needed.

I think we got hung up on political issues. The last discussion was not
technical (other than "no, you can't use ! -- it's already an operator).

I'd love to move onto discussing the technical hurdles, but I don't
think we came to a political conclusion, yet.

> I think this is a bogus argument. In order to benefit from namespaces
> you need to use them, just like to benefit from containment through
> prefixing you need to prefix functions/classes/etc... Namespaces are not
> a magic bullet that will instantly make your problems go away and make
> your code better. If anything it'll make code complex and intertwined,
> introduce serious scope issue most people have not had to consider up
> until now and so on. It will without a doubt increase language
> complexity as well, which generally translates to a loss in performance.

I don't think namespaces are a magic bullet. As it stands, it's
impossible to use namespaces without a third party patch that may or may
not work. I strongly believe that if namespaces are implemented in PHP
6, most of our prefixing/symbol collisions will go away as people
migrate. It's much easier to track down a failed import than to comment
out a function declaration in the PHP source.

I also don't deny that there will be a minor performance hit. There are
a ton of other things in PHP that reduce performance.. the idea is to
find a balance of which ones are worth it (as we did with OOP and
Unicode), and I believe that namespaces are worth it. I also know that
I'm not alone in this.

S