it is up to the _application_ to solve conflicts (i.e., not import
everything from both namespaces). Currently, an application can't do
Exactly - not import everything from namespaces. That's what we are doing :)
anything about name conflicts in libraries short of editing the
source; namespaces (assuming the libraries adopt them) give the
Actually, they can and they do - they use long names which have high chance to be unique. This works, but this is extremely ugly and inconvenient to work with.
If there are technical reasons (i.e., compile-time name resolution,
as you mentioned in passing), I think it'd be beneficial to see a
discussion of those.
Compile-time resolution means you don't get performance penalty for namespaces when you are not using it, and have very low costs when you do use it. Allowing blanket imports means we don't know what "new Foo()" means until it is executed - meaning we need to make extra lookups on each class fetch, even if the code doesn't use namespaces at all. That's only one problem with blanket imports.
--
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect
stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/
(408)253-8829 MSN: stas@zend.com