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Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2007 09:54:31 -0800
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Namespace
From: stas@zend.com (Stanislav Malyshev)

> I agree. If the solution to this is to start adding prefixes to the aliased
> names, then namespaces lose part of their purpose.

The solution is not to import everything in global space. If you must, 
namespaces as such won't help you avoid collisions. The purpose of 
namespaces is *NOT* (I don't know how to make it more clear - should I 
use blinking text, flash graphics and pictures of dancing girls/boys in 
bikinis?) - it is *NOT* to allow you shoving all your library classes 
into global space and in some magic way make same names mean different 
classes by telepathically reading your mind. The purpose of namespaces 
is to make working with long names - necessary to avoid collisions - 
easier, by enabling not always use the whole long name but sometimes 
only a part of it.

> Globbing of this nature, in my humbled opinion, would not be the best idea
> because of the high potential of problems. But, in the same respect, with

That's *exactly* why it was dropped. More precisely, it is one of the 
reasons - other being it would break lookup performance and bytecode 
caches.

> I think this is a huge issue, if only for consistency with other constructs
> of the language. There are already three different ways to write an

Guys, really, how many times should we beat this particular dead horse?

> The only difference, on the surface, that I see with namespaces vs. standard
> prefixing is that namespaces has a new keyword and changes the separator
> from an underscore to the double colon. Beyond that, without the other

Well, I think reading the actual docs would help to see more. Besides 
that, namespaces allow aliasing of prefixes and automatic prefixing.

> For what it's worth, I would have to completely agree with Derick on this
> issue. It just seems that namespaces could be made to do much more than it
> already does.

Leaving braces aside (please!), what capabilities that were not 
discussed before do you need?
-- 
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect
stas@zend.com   http://www.zend.com/
(408)253-8829   MSN: stas@zend.com