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Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:17:56 -0400
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To: Stanislav Malyshev <stas@zend.com>
CC: Lukas Kahwe Smith <mls@pooteeweet.org>, 
 PHP Developers Mailing List <internals@lists.php.net>,
 Dmitry Stogov <dmitry@zend.com>
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Subject: Re: towards a 5.3 release
From: greg@chiaraquartet.net (Greg Beaver)

Stanislav Malyshev wrote:
> Hi!
>
>> This fixes the logic problem, and re-introduces the performance 
>> slowdown for internal classes.  FORTUNATELY there is a simple 
>> solution to this, which is to "use" all global classes:
>
> The thing is since it'd work without "use", most users would do it 
> that way and have horrible code. But if you can do use ::Exception, 
> you can the same way do use Foo::Exception, right? So what's the 
> difference? 

The difference is in what you quoted - name resolution is 
non-deterministic with current implementation.  The suggested change 
always works the same way.  It turns out my internet access is even 
worse than I thought, so I may only be reading/replying once every week 
to two weeks until August, please bear with me :/

In other words, with the current implementation, you can just do "use 
Foo::Exception;" and it works, but if you *forget* to do the use 
statement, you can get unpredictable behavior with no warning until your 
code starts not working properly.  With the suggested change of name 
resolution, your code always works as you designed it, but if you forget 
to "use ::Exception", then your code is simply slightly slower (1 extra 
call to autoload if it exists), but still works properly.  It also tilts 
the "use" towards internal classnames, which in my experience tend to be 
outnumbered by userspace classnames, so it will reduce code size, making 
it more readable.

Greg