Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:41736
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: error (pb1.pair.com: domain fmethod.com from 69.16.228.148 cause and error)
Message-ID: <91597FF883CD4BA3861A5C72134BCA56@pc>
To: <internals@lists.php.net>
References: <4EA88C3A8A2747989925A5D21448FCE7@pc> <491333F2.5070105@zend.com>
Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2008 20:33:33 +0200
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	format=flowed;
	charset="windows-1251";
	reply-type=response
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Call it: allow reserved words in a class or not?
From: sv_forums@fmethod.com ("Stan Vassilev | FM")

> Hi!
>
>> As you know, with the new convention, the parser will not encounter 
>> T_STRING "Zend\Validate\Interface" but rather:
>
> With namespaces, class name would not be Zend\Validate\Interface. Having 
> namespaces, it would make much more sense to make last component a 
> descriptive name, so you won't have code like this:
>
> if($object instanceof Interface) { // wtf am I checking here?
> ...
>
> As for how exactly that descriptive name should look - I guess each 
> framework's developers that plan to support namespaces think about it hard 
> right now. I know ZF developers do :)


Hi,

Fully agreed. Though since we (PHP users) will all be using namespaces 
together, it makes much more sense that we have a paradigm, recommendation 
for namespace usage that all frameworks will follow.
Maybe the ZF, Agavi, CI, CakePHP etc. authors should get together and craft 
a single recommendation list for people to use.

It's not just a matter of consistency, it's a matter of makming the language 
work well with the recommended scenario and use patterns of namespaces.

Two things are obvious:

1) What worked with underscores won't work with namespaces.

2) What scenario above with "instanceof Interface" isn't very likely. Why? 
Well imagine you want to use 5 classes in namespace foo\bar, called A, B, C, 
D, E (ex. foo\bar\A). In most any language with packaging system, to flatten 
the space you simply do this:

use foo\bar\*;

$a = new A();
$b = new B();
...

In PHP, due to lack of packaging system and knowledge of the user resources 
at parse time, instead we're painfully explicit:

use foo\bar\A;
use foo\bar\B;
use foo\bar\C;
use foo\bar\D;
use foo\bar\E;

$a = new A();
$b = new B();

Which makes this usage pattern with aliases much more likely to see:

use foo\bar as fb;

$a = new fb\A();
$b = new fb\B();

So your example above would rather be:

use Zend\Validate as ZV;

... instanceof ZV\Interface;

And this is why it's worth it to arrive at a single list of recommendations 
for namespace usage, and see what works there and what might not work, and 
tweak the language for it.

Regards,
Stan Vassilev