# [Concept] declare(strict_identifiers=1) - Thread: https://externals.io/message/132417 - Original archive: https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/132417 - Started by Otzelot2021@outlook.de on 2026-09-03T18:28:56+00:00 - Messages: 1 - Reply by email to internals@lists.php.net - More for agents: search with https://externals.io/search.md?q={query} · RFCs at https://externals.io/rfc.md · JSON API at https://externals.io/api · documentation at https://externals.io/llms.txt --- ## #132417 — Otzelot2021@outlook.de — 2026-09-03T18:28:56+00:00 URL: https://externals.io/message/132417#132417 Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [Concept] declare(strict_identifiers=1) Hi internals, A week on, and no answer to the question I ended up with, so let me close this rather than let it go quiet on its own. Thank you to everyone who replied. The proposal I opened with did not survive the thread, and I think it was right that it did not. Three things it established that I did not know a week ago: Claude Pache: names are not identifiers. A name is any string that reaches a symbol table; an identifier is a lexical token. I had been conflating them, and the distinction is PHP's own, not something a proposal has to invent. Rowan Tommins: rejecting and normalising are different questions, and PHP already normalises via ASCII case folding. Sorted along that axis, what I brought is not one feature but three, with three different audiences and three different prices -- which is why bundling them behind one declare drew objections from three directions at once. Larry Garfield: 250 packages was not enough. At 5,000 packages and 520,802 files the answer changes character. It is not "one oddball class in Symfony": markrogoyski/math-php has 888 identifiers that a mandatory rule would break, and they are deliberate -- variable names that spell the formula. Outside that one package, 135 non-ASCII identifiers exist and only 25 fail, 15 of them in a single test file. Vincenty geodesy in mjaschen/phpgeo, Latte's U+029F prefix in tracy/tracy and generated Russian WSDL accessors in wsdltophp all already conform. Across both corpora, 627,515 files, not one identifier is outside NFC. The question that stayed unanswered is whether non-ASCII identifiers are a supported feature of PHP. The manual says they are not and explains that they work by accident; 1,447 of them in the top 5,000 packages say otherwise. Without an answer I cannot tell which of the three parts is worth building, so I am not going to write an RFC on a guess. What I will do is send a documentation PR describing what actually happens today -- names compared as bytes, encoding neither interpreted nor validated, two names that render identically able to be distinct -- without claiming in either direction that they are supported, since that is the part this list has not decided. The survey stays up, with tooling, self-test, raw scanner output and per-identifier CSVs, so that anyone who picks this up later starts from data rather than from zero: https://github.com/Otzie2023/PHP One loose end, in case it is ever useful. Claude Pache said he would like the compiler to complain when he accidentally types a no-break space. That is the smallest piece of what I proposed, it needs no declare and no opt-in, and the measurement is 68 identifiers with an invisible character across 520,802 files. If there is ever appetite for that on its own, I will write it. Regards, Luca