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Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:36:15 +0200
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To: "internals@lists.php.net" <internals@lists.php.net>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Importing namespaced functions
From: igor@wiedler.ch (Igor Wiedler)

Let me give you two specific cases where I think importing a function
significantly improves the readability of code.

A) Tiny libraries

I recently released a "library" that really just consists of two =
functions.
Those functions are named compose() and pipeline(), and the library is =
named
"igorw/compose". I didn't want to risk conflicts in the global =
namespace, so I
just put them in the "igorw" namespace.

Now users need to do this:

    $x =3D igorw\compose('foo', 'bar', 'baz');

It's distracting to have my vendor name in there every time they call =
the
function. They can alias it, but then they just need to come up with a =
random
word that makes no sense.

    compose\compose(...);
    c\compose(...);
    foo\compose(...);

B) Domain specific languages

I hope I'm not mis-using the term "DSL" here, so just let me explain =
what I
mean. When building some kind of representation of something, it can =
sometimes
be quite nice to have a set of functions representing the elements, and =
nest
those calls.

An example of this could be building HTML (you can apply it to building
workflows, business rules, graphs, configuration, etc).

    use html\div, html\p, html\em;

    $html =3D div(p('Some', em('Text')));

Having to prefix the namespace in either of these cases leads to a lot =
of
noise. Hopefully that gives you a better idea of where I'm coming from.

Regards,

Igor