MEGA-patch: namespaces are R.I.P.

At 14:13 02.06.2003, Stanislav Malyshev wrote:

stas            Mon Jun  2 08:13:11 2003 EDT

Modified files:

    /ZendEngine2        [...]

Log: MEGA-patch: namespaces are R.I.P.

Hi all, removing namespaces because of a few remaining problems was a very bad idea. And after reading the last threads on this i have the strong feeling that the majority of people interested in PHP development is pro namespaces. By removing namespaces we lost one of the last things we need to be fully enterprise ready. Let me explain. By changing the object model to fully support visibility and also having abstract methods and interfaces we have reached a language level that allows to design PHP code with UML tools. Unfortunately now namespaces are missing we lack a dedicated grouping mechanism. Such grouping is often used as a package alternative (in languages where that is missing) and hence plays a role in responsibility organizing and highlevel software abstract organizing. Coming back to the problems. There are two major problems with namespaces as they were until they were removed. First there is the problem with import which doesn't work right now. Here i must say that noone cared about yet simply because it was never in a acceptable state. This said dropping it for now would have been the best solution. Adding a working version of import at a later time/version of PHP would have been also now problem. The second problem is the support of ':' in namespaces which caused trouble with the ternary operator. About this i can only say that really noone ever understood why it was needed besides the guys who have implemented it. Not even the pear developers said that they have a need for it. For them (if i am not mistaken) it was ony a nice to have goodie. For me this leeds to only one possible solution: Put namespaces back in without import and ':' support. After fixing the real problems in the current engine. We could then add a working import. As it was already said that "import cannot be 'fixed', because it's not broken". i feel a need to show a possible solution. First of all i am not really interested in the import we had, since it was broken. Second what i'd like is a kind of "select". For me this means that an import statement should import selected symbols into the active namespace. I do not expect this to overwrite anything because i think the solution is to have a dedicated hash table for the imports and use them only when the original symbol table fails to deliver the requested symbol. Anything that this solution cannot handle is an error by software design. Especially importing symbols which interfere with symbols already in the target hash table could result in an error to prevent such bad design. Also it is easy to emit an error when multiple import statements would result in a conflict. Since PHP is not a strong typed language i do not see any real error besides the mentioned problems. regards marcus