solution to the "Date" issue

Hello Stefan,

Saturday, November 26, 2005, 9:21:07 AM, you wrote:

Not to start a flame war, but...

How about STD, Std, or something similar? It certainly works for... that
language... that has multiple implementations of the standard classes.
It can't hurt to play to people's comfort when the change doesn't really
affect PHP in any major way. :)

But yes, a standard class prefix (to be migrated to a namespace) sounds
more practical than either asking everyone to use prefixes or hoping
that the minimal user base is affected by a conflict.

And getting everyone into a habit of importing standard php classes --

class Date extends PHP_Date {}

Maybe go with proper CamelCase:

class Date extends PhpDate{}

:)

This violates the coding standards for class names. Words have to be
separated by underscores.

Mhhh noone updated the coding standards once we changed then before 5 was
released. Right now only the __PHP_Incomplete_Class and php_user_filter
plus ext MysqlI is ignoring them. The former could not be changed since
there is valid code out and MysqlI not adhering to the standards caused
an endless discussion...:
marcus@zaphod /usr/src/php-cvs $ php -r 'print_r(get_declared_classes());'|grep _
[8] => __PHP_Incomplete_Class
[9] => php_user_filter
[72] => mysqli_sql_exception
[73] => mysqli_driver
[75] => mysqli_warning
[76] => mysqli_result
[77] => mysqli_stmt

--

Best regards,
Marcus

Pierre wrote:

On Sat, 26 Nov 2005 00:50:04 -0600
cellog@php.net (Greg Beaver) wrote:

Pierre, you can do all the #ifdefs you want, this idea does not
prevent this :). In addition, the #ifdef has no effect on this idea.

You do not get the main problem.

• The ifdef makes it disappear from a user point of view

• The class should not even exist in the source

• Nobody tested, agreed on it

• 5.1 is frozen since july

Pierre,

I get the main problem, but I'm not sure that you do. I mean, think for
one second about what you're saying:

Taking the class out of PHP 5 will solve the problem for now (and I
absolutely agree that this is necessary - so does everyone else save
Derick, who is now on vacation and can't defend himself), but any time
in the future it is introduced as "Date" will conflict with all existing
code that has a class named "Date".

#ifdef will never solve this issue.

PHP code needs to reserve a naming area, I proposed PHP_ as a prefix
for all new internal classes. This means that if someone comes up
with a class to implement the Yertl standard as an internal class, it
would be named PHP_Yertl. When namespaces come out, this will not be
necessary, as we can do the same thing with the "PHP" namespace. This
to me is an incontrovertible argument for namespaces: we need these to
avoid PEAR's_Ridiculously_Long_Classnames.

Incidentally, this is not a new concept, all constants with two
underscores are explicitly reserved for internal use in the manual.

Surely the fact that the class exists is a problem, but it is easily
solved with #ifdef, as you said. The MAIN problem is that it is named
Date, and #ifdef will never solve this problem.

Greg