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Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2011 18:41:10 +0200
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To: Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@sugarcrm.com>
Cc: PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Make primitive type names reserved words (Was: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC]
 5.4 features for vote (long))
From: patrickallaert@php.net (Patrick ALLAERT)

2011/6/17 Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@sugarcrm.com>:

[snip]

> 2. Make primitive type names reserved words (in case we ever want some form
> of scalar typing or anything else with scalar types). Using them as
> identifiers would return parse error for now. May have BC implications.

I am not sure it is a good idea to make them reserved words without a
clear reason for doing so.

I'm sure some projects have defined classes with those keywords in
some namespace (to ensure they wouldn't conflict with possible PHP
built-in stuff) like in:

namespace \Types {
    class Int {
        // ...
    }
    class Float {
        // ...
    }
    class String {
        // ...
    }
    // ...
}

Developer may have taken care of defining them in a specific
namespace, would it be possible to not break their application while
making them reserved keywords in the global namespace only?

I would be +1 if this could be done for the global namespace only.
However, -1 if this would break the usage of classes like \Types\Int,
\Types\String, ... would break.

Please, rethink your vote taking this into account. I don't think it
is required to hurry up on that decision while we still don't have a
*clear* proposition for scalar type hinting.

Cheers,
Patrick

[snip]