Re: namespace issues

On 23.09.2008, at 09:47, Dmitry Stogov wrote:

Stanislav Malyshev wrote:

Hi! On the ZendCon, we (Marcus, Elizabeth, Andi and myself) had a talk about what we'd like to do with namespaces, and we arrived at the following conclusions, which we propose to implement in 5.3: 1. Allow braces for namespaces. So, the syntax for namespaces will be: a) namespace foo; should be first (non-comment) statement in the file, namespace extends to the end of the file or next namespace declaration. b) namespace foo {} can appear anywhere on the top scope (can not be nested). Mixing both syntaxes in one file is not possible. The semantics of both syntaxes will be identical. 2. Simplify resolution order for classes in the namespace: unqualified names are resolved this way: a) check "use" list if the name was defined at "use", follow that resolution b) if not, the name resolves to namespace::name Consequence of this will be that for using internal class inside namespace one would need to refer to it either as ::Foo or do use ::Foo prior to its usage. 3. Functions will not be allowed inside namespaces. We arrived to conclusion that they are much more trouble than they're worth, and summarily we would be better off without them. Most of the functionality could be easily achieved using static class methods, and the rest may be emulated with variable function names, etc. Comments?

Great, lets castrate the language to make it consistent. :( 1. I am fine with (1), except for unspecified scope of "use" statement inside namespace with bracket. I assume it should affect only current declaration and not the following namespace declarations (even with the same name). 2. This is acceptable only if we accept (3) otherwise we will need to write ::strlen() and so on. 3. In case we remove functions we also need to remove constants as they have exactly the same ambiguity problems. It's unclear for me what the following code will define after all (global function or just emit a parse error?) <?php namespace foo { function bar() { } } ?>

Right, Stas, did you also discuss removal of constants? Seems logical as the really the same arguments apply. regards, Lukas Kahwe Smith mls@pooteeweet.org