If PHP team release in the news:
PHP has namespace support!
OR
PHP has package support!
Everyone will understand what does that mean. Those that do not
I wouldn't. And that's not because I'm so dense, but because "package" could mean anything, from next generation autoloader (I myself proposed such concept a while ago, and others did too) to integrating PHAR support into core.
understand are the ones that had never worked with it and can work in
Or worked with different ones enough to understand that "packages" is used for a zillion of different things, while namespace is quite well-defined concept. I quoted the wikipedia a number of times, let me quote it once again:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_package
"A Java package is a mechanism for organizing Java classes into namespaces."
Now let you find a quote which says "A C++ namespace is a mechanism of organizing C++ code into packages". I bet you won't find it - because people explain un-obvious concepts in terms of more obvious ones, and namespace is more obvious than package.
--
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect
stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/
(408)253-8829 MSN: stas@zend.com