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Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2012 23:09:56 +0200
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To: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=e89a8ff1cb6ce320aa04be22b506
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Complete case-sensitivity in PHP
From: g.rossolini@gmail.com (Guillaume Rossolini)

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Hi there,

Out of curiosity, how would one migrate a codebase for full case
sensitivity in PHP? They would need to rewrite their calls of core
functions, plus PECL functions. Those are easy enough to spot, but there
are also custom extensions. True, one could maybe parse the .h files to get
the functions, classes, interfaces etc. as long as there are .h files or
similar, and rewrite everything based on that. However, there are also
userland functions, classes and other identifiers that could be defined
anywhere, from files on disk to an encrypted database somewhere. Plus, as
Matthew pointed out, identifiers are not always fully written in the code:
they can be concatenated or aliased, and these calls would need to be
rewritten too (and good luck finding them all).

I am sure I have not listed here all the challenges in migrating for this
new functionality, but I hope it will be enough that we do _not_ get case
sensitivity for functions/classes/interfaces/etc. in PHP. The cost truly
outweights the benefits. I can understand why bug #18556 should be fixed,
but I don't understand why the solution should be to make PHP a fully case
sensitive language.

@C.Koy: until now, tools have been able to cope with PHP's case
insensitivity just fine. I have no idea how difficult it is to do, but
obviously they can do it. And anyway, I use tools _because_ they do some of
the work for me, so that's just a tribute to their usefullness, isn't it?
Regarding other languages, it has been stated before on this list that PHP
is its own language.

Regards,

--
Guillaume Rossolini

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