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Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2015 22:52:52 +0400
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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: dmitry@zend.com (Dmitry Stogov)

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Hi Alexander,

On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 10:48 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?
>

I case we would designed a new language I would rise two hands.
Changing, syntax in an existent widely used language is an additional pain
for users.
Technically it shouldn't be very difficult to remove support for
case-insensitivity, and it'll even improve speed and memory consumption,
but I don't think it costs the compatibility break.

Thanks. Dmitry.

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