Re: Re: Namespaces in PHP 6 - ++$take

What does everyone else think? Are functions/constants inside namespaces really that critical? Anyways, I just thought of a possible solution to the namespace separator issue, and if it's doable, then the double colon (::) can even be used and no conflicts would occur. It seems the biggest problem with handling namespaces is determining if a symbol is a class or namespace at compile-time. I am no expert in flex/bison, but I was thinking that a state can be used, such as LOOKING_FOR_CLASS_OR_NAMESPACE, which will return either a T_CLASS_NAME or T_NAMESPACE_NAME token depending on whether the symbol is known to be a class or namespace. The user will add either a "using" or "import" statement before the use of the symbol, and this will allow the parser to know what that symbol is in the compilation phase. As an example: // BEGIN CODE using namespace PEAR::File; $items = File::Find::glob( '!.*\.php$!', $dir, 'perl' ); // END CODE The first statement will add an entry into a hashtable (used during compilation) indicating that "PEAR", "PEAR::File", and "File" are namespaces ("File" will be imported in the current file only). When "File::Find::glob" is parsed, the compiler already knows that "File" is a namespace, so "Find" must be a class inside that namespace, and "glob" must be a static method. With this, functions and constants can easily be added inside namespaces, as the "using" or "import" statement will indicate to the parser which portion of the qualified name is a namespace. Is this feasible in flex/bison? Let me know if anything needs clarification. Regards, Jessie Hernandez Stefan Walk wrote:

Hi! If the namespace-approach only covers classes it is implemented half-heartedly, IMO. I see a lot of "classes" that are just really collections of static functions, that's what namespaces should cover, too. And disallowing constants only so that : works is a bad tradeoff... Regards, Stefan