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Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2015 09:02:21 +0100
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To: Alexander Lisachenko <lisachenko.it@gmail.com>
Cc: PHP internals list <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [Discussion] Last chance for case-sensitive engine
From: pajousek@gmail.com (=?UTF-8?Q?Pavel_Kou=C5=99il?=)

On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 8:48 AM, Alexander Lisachenko
<lisachenko.it@gmail.com> wrote:
> Morning!
>
> I want to ask this question one more time before PHP7 feature freeze: can
> we  the engine case sensitive from PHP>=7.0?
>
> There is a draft for that: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/case-sensitivity
> (mostly empty), so I decided to ask this question in the internals mail
> list.
>
> Pros: more simple O(1) hash table checks for properties, functions,
> methods, classes without strtolower normalization on the engine/parser
> level. Consistency with unicode class names (yes, they are case sensitive,
> check http://3v4l.org/ia0pc), consistency with exisiting PSR0,4 standards
> (case sensitive mapping of class names to the file names)
>
> From my experience, all modern PHP framework don't use case-insensitive
> code, so chance to break anything for them is really low.
>
> Cons: on the extension level things aren't so good and can be some BC
> breaks (like with phpng)
>
> Possible ways:
>
> 1) Keep PHP engine case-insensitive for PHP7
> 2) Make PHP engine case-sensitive since PHP7 with possible minor BC breaks
> in the extensions (this breaks can be easily fixed)
> 3) Add a compile-time switch, eg. --with-case-sensitivity to the
> configuration to have an ability to build PHP with sensitivity and make
> this option enabled by default since next major version (PHP>=8.0). Add
> deprecation notices in 7.x
>
> Thoughts?

Hello,

I'd personally LOVE PHP being case-sensitive, but I think it's not possible.

Sure, frameworks and newer code will won't be broken, but what about
the tons of "legacy" code? Personally, I saw too much code (and even
examples in tutorials!) using stuff like MySQL_Query(). And case
sensitivity would break this code without a doubt. (I know mysql ext
is deprecated, but that's relevant right now, this is just one of many
examples - the most common one I can think of, actually).

On the other hand, this could be fixed by running some migration
scripts over code base, so maybe it's not THAT bad? Who knows.

Regards
Pavel Kouril