Naming convention for build-in classes and interfaces

Hello Ferdinand,

Sunday, November 30, 2003, 10:42:20 AM, you wrote:

Hello everyone,

I think we have reached a point where we should really consider a
naming convention for build-in classes and interfaces. In my opinion,
popular class names like "exception", "iterator" or "directory" should
be left to user land.

An exception is more or less a language construct and we need a base
exception which can do all the general things which you cannot accomplish at
userland so the internal one is called exception. If i would name it
BaseException then i would expect that it is nowhere used and derive a class
Exception internally to use where we throw exceptions.

For the other names: OO is about code reuse so the common things should
either be done in pear, in an extension or in the engine so that anybody can
take advantage of good tested code without the need to reinvent the wheel
anytime. If you feel the need that the common solution doesn't really fit
your needs, well then you have discovered the other aspect of oo programming
which is specialization for specific needs. And hence only a few tiny
changes/specializations are needed.

Moreover we should make more use of interfaces for magical OO
behavior like cloning, casting, serializing and overloading.

Therefore my suggestion is to introduce following symbols:

• class php_object instead of stdclass, since (object) $var represents
  an object and not a class. It is more meaningfull to create a new
  php_object() instead a new stdclass()

Sounds logical, but i'd like phpObject more.

• class php_exception instead of exception

• interface php_cloneable for classes implementing the __clone()
  method

• interface php_serializeable for classes implementing __sleep() and
  __wakeup()

• interface php_overloadable for classes implementing __get(),
  __set() and __call()

Maybe there is a better prefix than "php" to strictly separate Zend
Engine from PHP. Examples are "zend_xxx", "zxxx" or "__xxx".

Too many magical feetures is bad because it is hard to understand.

Best regards,
Marcus mailto:helly@php.net