Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:60070
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: error (pb1.pair.com: domain ralphschindler.com from 209.85.214.170 cause and error)
Message-ID: <4F8D51A0.5070605@ralphschindler.com>
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2012 06:18:56 -0500
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:11.0) Gecko/20120327 Thunderbird/11.0.1
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Nicolas Grekas <nicolas.grekas+php@gmail.com>
CC: internals@lists.php.net
References: <4F89D4F1.8070009@ralphschindler.com> <4F8CEB3B.4080702@ralphschindler.com> <CAOWwgp=Bm2fmoAy9p_5VAeGGTYd61=4ooQL8+Fg2RQt+mySQPg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAOWwgp=Bm2fmoAy9p_5VAeGGTYd61=4ooQL8+Fg2RQt+mySQPg@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: New Feature: Fully qualified class name resolution
 as scalar with class keyword
From: ralph@ralphschindler.com (Ralph Schindler)


> May I suggest using foo::__CLASS__ instead of foo::class ? It's longer,
> but closer to what already exists for this semantic (class name as
> string), don't you think ?
>

As Marco suggested, I think using __CLASS__ would be confusing to some. 
  __CLASS__ generally means, "where you see this, replace it with the 
class you are in right now".

I generally don't like to draw comparisons too closely to Java and .NET, 
but Java has this, they call it a "class literal", which works the same 
way as described in my new feature:

 
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2160788/what-is-a-class-literal-in-java

In .net, if a type is a SystemType.Type object (which I think are all 
types), you can simply call a function on it to get the name:

   http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/9f49ew66.aspx

In addition, I am unsure if there would be any BC issues with your 
proposed syntax.  I do know with mine (::class) does not pose any BC 
issues since the class keyword was limited to declaring a class only. 
At least, the tests prove this, and I can't find any other usages of 
T_CLASS in the parser.

> Personnaly, I would say that an RFC would be good for historical
> reference and documentation.

I think you're right, I'll do this today.

-ralph