Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:40609
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain zend.com designates 212.25.124.163 as permitted sender)
Message-ID: <48D7F5EF.3090202@zend.com>
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:45:51 -0700
Organization: Zend Technologies
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.17 (Windows/20080914)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: 'PHP Internals' <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: namespace issues 
From: stas@zend.com (Stanislav Malyshev)

Hi!

On the ZendCon, we (Marcus, Elizabeth, Andi and myself) had a talk about 
what we'd like to do with namespaces, and we arrived at the following 
conclusions, which we propose to implement in 5.3:

1. Allow braces for namespaces. So, the syntax for namespaces will be:
a) namespace foo;
should be first (non-comment) statement in the file, namespace extends 
to the end of the file or next namespace declaration.
b) namespace foo {}
can appear anywhere on the top scope (can not be nested).
Mixing both syntaxes in one file is not possible. The semantics of both 
syntaxes will be identical.

2. Simplify resolution order for classes in the namespace: unqualified 
names are resolved this way:
a) check "use" list if the name was defined at "use", follow that resolution
b) if not, the name resolves to namespace::name
Consequence of this will be that for using internal class inside 
namespace one would need to refer to it either as ::Foo or do use ::Foo 
prior to its usage.

3. Functions will not be allowed inside namespaces. We arrived to 
conclusion that they are much more trouble than they're worth, and 
summarily we would be better off without them. Most of the functionality 
could be easily achieved using static class methods, and the rest may be 
emulated with variable function names, etc.

Comments?
-- 
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect
stas@zend.com   http://www.zend.com/
(408)253-8829   MSN: stas@zend.com