Suggestions: Built-in classes for PHP5

Hello, as you might know, the Zend Engine 2 features a built-in Exception class. The problem with a class named Exception is that no user-defined class named Exception may exist. Suggestion #1 is to make use of Andrei's API function zend_register_internal_class_in_ns and to move it to a namespace called "php". This can be accomplished with a simple patch to Zend/zend_default_classes.c (attached). Main motivation for this patch: Users having their own class Exception might want to extend it from Throwable, Object. Of course, they could put in into their own namespace, then having to specify it everywhere. It just seems nicer to me not to force users to do so. Those users who are completely content with the built-in exception could still a) import it import class Exception from php; or b) extend it as in class MyException extends php::Exception { } . Suggestion #2 extends the first and goes a bit farther, featuring three more internal classes, object, throwable and error. An implementation, a test script, its output and some initial documentation can be seen at http://sitten-polizei.de/php/zend_default_classes/ The sourcecode seen there also includes: * Checks on static calls to the class methods. At the moment, if a user called var_dump(Exception::getMessage());, it would lead to a segmentation fault (access to getThis() which is then NULL). * A version of var_export() that prints out the member access types such as public, private, and protected and recognizes static members. The toString() method uses this, for example. Comments welcome! - Timm

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