Re: RFC: short and inner classes

On 17 March 2025 07:11:23 GMT, Rob Landers <rob@bottled.codes> wrote: > >namespace Outer; > >class Inner {} > >And > >class Outer { > class Inner {} >} > >These would both resolve to the same class name for Outer\Inner. That's the frame challenge: is that actually a good thing, because it makes the description of nested types a lot simpler? > Which one it resolves to would depend on how you implement autoloading That's just the same as having the same class defined in two files on disk - PHP doesn't know which will be used until an autoloader runs. From what I understand of the proposal, the calling code won't know anything different based on it being "nested" or "namespaced", it will just see a class with a long name with some punctuation in. > Then there becomes the question of either letting user-land implement the autoloading changes, > or have php walk “up” the namespace chain in the hopes it implements an inner class. I think it should be left to the implementation - PHP makes no assumption about one class per file anyway, so am implementation could already do this with a namespace{} block. It is a reasonable point that the convention for when an autoloader should walk up, and how far, would need to be defined. Then again, I'm increasingly convinced autoloading is a dead-end for the language, and hope to see more enhancements to preloading and a module system instead. > So, maybe, it could be useful to use \ but in the long run, I’m not sure it makes sense. I rather think the other way round: in the short term, a new separator would save users a bit of pain with autoloading, but in the long run it will look like a weird anomaly that no other language needs. Rowan Tommins [IMSoP]