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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] A possible defining characteristic of PHP 6 ( was [off]
 PHP: a fractal of bad design )
From: smalyshev@sugarcrm.com (Stas Malyshev)

Hi!

> PHP's goal has always been KISS, but the decisions over the last few
> years run contrary to that.  Most onerous is, where Javascript, Java
> and C have one scope resolution operator - a period - PHP has three
> (->, \, :: ).  The only possible backwards compat fix to that is to

This is not true. C++ (I assume that is what you mean by C) has -> and .
and ::. Of course, when you say "scope resolution", you mean a number of
different things. Javascript does not have namespaces at all - they use
huge objects for that instead, but Javascript is not OO so totally
different approach. Java does use . for everything, but I'm not sure
it's actually for the best.

>  That would restore simplicity, and two of the operators would die off
> (my money is on :: and \ dying) in common use.  The engine

No it would not restore simplicity. If you read the history of why \
came into being (I know, nobody ever would do that, unless somebody
writes a fantasy book about it with zombies and vampires, but let's
assume for the sake of discussion) you'd see that initially we would
have used ::, but that created a number of ambiguities which people
though would be confusing.
I personally think we could have lived with it and worked around it for
the sake of better esthetics but the community decided simplicity is
more important, so it was made so.
-- 
Stanislav Malyshev, Software Architect
SugarCRM: http://www.sugarcrm.com/
(408)454-6900 ext. 227