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To: internals@lists.php.net,Greg Beaver <greg@chiaraquartet.net>
Message-ID: <48FB74E7.6050007@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2008 13:56:55 -0400
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Subject: Re: my last attempt at sanity with namespaces
From: jrhernandez05@gmail.com (Jessie Hernandez)

Greg Beaver wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> http://wiki.php.net/rfc/namespaceissues
> 
> Read it and discuss.  Let's be clear people: the technical problems in
> namespaces are limited and solvable.  The problems in the political
> environment surrounding them may not be.  Wouldn't politics be a
> stupid-ass reason to remove namespaces?
> 
> Greg

Hi Greg,

I've read through the posts and the RFC and am not sure if this was 
discussed before, but there is one other proposal I'd like to throw out 
there: why not require all classes that are inside namespaces to be 
explicitly imported? This would follow the AS3 approach 
(http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/statements.html#import).

I believe this would solve the issue with the namespace separator at 
compile-time. The namespace separator can be left as :: and would only 
be used in certain cases, such as when creating objects dynamically 
(i.e. <code>$c = 'MyNs::MyClass'; $o = new $c;</code>). The double-colon 
would work dynamically, since at runtime you can tell what's a namespace 
and what's a class.

So the class resolution rules would change to the following:

1) If the class was explicitly use'd, then use that class.
2) If not, look for the class in the global namespace (this would 
include internal classes).

If one wanted to have a custom Exception class inside a namespace, one 
would first alias the core Exception class and then extend from that:

<?php
use Exception as PhpException;

class Exception extends PhpException {}
?>


Thoughts, comments?

-- 

Jessie Hernandez
Zend Certified Engineer (http://zend.com/zce.php?c=ZEND006359&r=222727282)