Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:41046
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: unknown (pb1.pair.com: domain php.net does not designate 82.94.239.7 as permitted sender)
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2008 09:04:38 +0200 (CEST)
To: Lukas Kahwe Smith <mls@pooteeweet.org>
cc: PHP Development <internals@lists.php.net>
In-Reply-To: <3CF765DF-27AF-44FD-9ECF-BEBFC8A0AFCA@pooteeweet.org>
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.0.98.0810150853100.30375@kossu.ez.no>
References: <3CF765DF-27AF-44FD-9ECF-BEBFC8A0AFCA@pooteeweet.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=UTF-8
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] namespaces and alpha3
From: derick@php.net (Derick Rethans)

On Fri, 10 Oct 2008, Lukas Kahwe Smith wrote:

> At this point I guess we have the choice between:
> 
> 1) rip them out
> 2) status quo
> 3) Stas proposal
> 4) Dmitrys proposal
> 
> Again I hope that Stas/Dmitry will give us an insight about their proposals,
> though Stas proposal might or might not see any changes.

Stas wrote up an RFC about the two proposals:
http://wiki.php.net/rfc/namespaceref

Now I finally figured out what the two things are without having to real 
a gazillion pointless posts it makes it easier to formulate my point of 
view.

It seems that we're not quite 100% how we want to do things. Reading the 
"Namespaces with functions/constants" part of Stas' RFC makes me 
cringe... just changing the behavior of -> and :: to just make things 
work is a cludge, and a bad one at that. The other part, "Namespaces 
without functions/constants" is a much more practical solution. However, 
a third one might be to use a syntax separator that we've not seen at 
all yet (I'd say ':::').

Even with the "No functions/constants" option 
I've issues, because of the resolving of internal classes. In a 
namespace using "new className" they would resolve to 
nameSpace::className. Having to use ::className to get to an internal 
class is yet another cludge. IMO the internal classes should be able to 
use with the "::" and should have precedence over namespace'd classes 
with the same name. If you really want to re-use an internal class name, 
use "namespace::className". I realize that that means you need to 
have at least two "elements" of the namespace'd class while using them. 
However, while reading code it makes it absolutely clear whether you're 
using an internal class or not.

As we're getting really close to 5.3, I would suggest to remove 
namespaces from this release as we're simply not done with even agreeing 
on how things should work. PHP 5.3 has many other cool things, and 
leaving namespaces for PHP 6 means we're actually introducing 
functionality there as well (for the folks that don't care about 
Unicode). We've done with namespaces for a loooong time, and they've 
never really been *required*. Many people won't be able to use it any 
way as they have to support older PHP versions in their code base as 
well. PHP 6 is a much more natural switch for something like this.
If we *absolutely *have* to* have namespaces, then we should go with the 
"Namespaces without functions/constants" proposal, with some tweaks. 
However, I still think it's not ready enough to put even that into 5.3.

regards,
Derick


-- 
HEAD before 5_3!: http://tinyurl.com/6d2esb
http://derickrethans.nl | http://ezcomponents.org | http://xdebug.org