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Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 15:01:40 +0100
Message-ID: <CAGAGxbaKK4P2D5epQTzEzNx3jcBP7XCPexGA4gyA3hdx3p+UKg@mail.gmail.com>
To: Joe Watkins <pthreads@pthreads.org>
Cc: Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@sugarcrm.com>, =?UTF-8?Q?Johannes_Schl=C3=BCter?= <johannes@schlueters.de>, 
	Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me>, Dmitry Stogov <dmitry@zend.com>, 
	Philip Hofstetter <phofstetter@sensational.ch>, PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=001a11337a40c9fde205062b9e1e
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] UString
From: daverandom@php.net (Chris Wright)

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On 24 October 2014 07:03, Joe Watkins <pthreads@pthreads.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 2014-10-23 at 12:54 -0700, Stas Malyshev wrote:
> > Hi!
> >
> > > P.S. u() is a bad name, will break lots of code, i.e.
> >
> > Maybe __u()? It's a bit ugly but you're not allowed to use __ so it's
> safe.
> >
>
> /me cringes ...
>
> I wonder how much of a problem it really is, usually when we say some
> function name is a problem is because of hundreds and hundreds of
> results on github.
>
> If it's a huge problem then we should rename it, if we have to dig
> around for a single project that's incompatible, or even a handful, then
> it's not really a problem.
>
> Cheers
> Joe


I can see this being something relatively common. While I personally would
never do it, there are a few reasons I can think of that people *might* do
it:

- Wrapper for creating <u> HTML output
- urlencode() shortcut
- (obviously) various unicode-related things

Searching on codesearch [1] revealed (amongst a few other hits on the first
page) another interesting use of it in the hhvm test suite [2]. It's
difficult to search for this because all the available public search
engines that I know of do fuzzy matching.

Sorry. This sucks, because every other option we have for this is sucks.

On the bright side, anything chosen could always be aliased at the top of
the file:

use function __u as u;

This also sucks, but it sucks a little bit less because the collisions are
avoided - or at least, avoided in such a way that the onus is on the user -
and one can still have the sane name.

First-class support at the syntax level (presumably $foo = u"unicode
string" since we already have $foo = b"binary string") would IMO be better
and (hopefully?) a long-term goal, but I am aware that it is - and probably
should be - outside the scope of the current proposal.

[1] https://searchcode.com/?q=function+u+lang%3Aphp
[2]
https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/blob/master/hphp/test/slow/ext_icu/uspoof.php#L13

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