Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:70634
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: error (pb1.pair.com: domain cerny-online.com from 83.220.144.26 cause and error)
SMTP-policy: ok
Message-ID: <52ABFE84.8010404@cerny-online.com>
Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2013 07:45:24 +0100
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.2.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: internals@lists.php.net
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
 boundary="------------010308060203070101040107"
Subject: Flexible function naming
From: robert@cerny-online.com (Robert Cerny)

--------------010308060203070101040107
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-15; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Hello,

I am new to the list. I have been a PHP user for 8 years. I am a 
progammer for 30 years. Initially i wanted to post this as an RFC, but 
could not figure out how to register. When accessing [1] i get 'Command 
disabled: register'. I did some research, but the archives are vast, so 
please accept my apologies in advance if this has already been discussed.

When a PHP code base is growing over time it looks more and more 
'diverse', because of inconsistent function and method naming in core 
PHP and third party libraries. This cannot be changed by any guidelines. 
The author of a function has the freedom to assign any name. The user of 
a function needs some flexibility in referring to a function. It should 
be possible to use 'array_key_exists', 'arrayKeyExists' or 
'arraykeyExists'. Because of the performance impact and possible 
resolution conflicts this language feature needs to be disabled by default.

This is not difficult to implement. It is only necessary to normalize 
function names: remove all but leading underscores and lower case the 
result. The likelihood of conflict is very small.

This small change would allow coding teams to create a consistent code 
base based on 'their' guidelines. Motto: "Have it your way!".

Best regards,

Robert Cerny

[1] https://wiki.php.net/start?do=register

--------------010308060203070101040107--