Re: Deprecate and remove case-insensitive constants?

On 12.09.2017 at 14:02, Christoph M. Becker wrote: > Usually constant identifiers are treated case-sensitive in PHP. This is > always the case for constants defined via a const declaration. > However, define() allows to pass TRUE as third argument to define a > case-insensitive constant. This feature appears to potentially result > in confusion, and also causes bugs as shown in > <https://bugs.php.net/74450>. See an example created by > Nikita to see > some probably unexpected behavior: > <https://3v4l.org/L6nCp>. > > Even if these issues could be resolved, I still think allowing both > case-sensitive and case-insensitive constant identifiers does more harm > than good, so either case-sensitive or case-insensitive constant > identifiers should be removed from the language. Since case-sensitive > constant identifiers are already the default, and HHVM doesn't even > support case-insensitive identifiers at all, I would suggest to remove > case-insensitive constant identifiers. > > This could be implemented by triggering E_DEPRECATED whenever the third > argument to define() is TRUE in PHP 7.3, and to remove this parameter > altogether in PHP 8. Most likely some further simplification in the > engine could be done then as well. > > Thoughts? Thanks to everybody for their comments on this topic! Frankly, I'm rather surprised about the large amount of objections – I just hadn't expected that. Now I'm pretty sure that a respective change wouldn't get broad consensus, and in my opinion broad consensus is of utmost importance regarding any change to php-src. Therefore I will not pursue the RFC. :) Sorry for the noise, if you regard this discussion as such. I, however, found it insightful, and learned a lot about case-insensitive constants, and I believe these lessions to be useful at least for me. So, thanks again! -- Christoph M. Becker