Hi!
What would happen if we give the namespace implementation a chance to mature is that it can be delivered as a fully-fledged language element rather than a partially-fledged and potentially flawed one.
What do you mean by "chance to mature"? Only chance for it to mature is people actually starting using it and not another week of discussing separators on internals. And people can't start using it if it's not only not released but there are developers rooting for it to be removed.
There is a way to make both: have people use them, and not commit to BC or
changes in 5.4 or a future release.
Introduce E_EXPERIMENTAL as part of E_ALL. Make it the counterpart of
E_STRICT.
E_STRICT is reserved for deprecated features, and E_EXPERIMENTAL would
complete this idea by letting us push experimental features such as
namespaces (and any other extensions marked as "EXPERIMENTAL" in the manual)
and have people play with them, so the core devs can get the feedback they
need and improve or remove the feature in a future release.
Have namespace related features throw E_EXPERIMENTAL warnings to people so
they are aware this feature may not be present in a future release, or
present but in another form.
Regards, Stan Vassilev