Re: Null bytes in anonymous class names

On Wed, 11 Nov 2015 01:06:32, Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me> wrote:

This is mostly tangential, but I note that we use "{closure}" as the name of anonymous functions. So, maybe it should be "{class}@..." for anonymous classes? It's at least semi-consistent...

Hi Andrea, Only slightly tangential - I'm interested in your input on this issue, and I'm keen to get this sorted out before 7.0 launches, so that we don't get stuck with something suboptimal until 8.0 because of BC concerns. To be honest, the original meaning of the class names has been lost since Phil and Joe's RFC[1]. It had originally been class@0x[addr], which had a reasonable semantic interpretation of "the (otherwise anonymous) class which can be found at the address [addr]". Dmitry added[2] the null byte and the filename, but he did so between the '@' and the '0x[addr]', with 'anonymous' added (just for good measure?). At this point, the purpose of the '@'-symbol was gone, in my opinion. Furthermore, the RFC allowed for the portion of the name before the '@' to identify the parent class:

    class mine {}
    new class extends mine {};

    This class name will be “mine@0x7fc4be471000”.

This behaviour was present in Joe's original implementation, but later removed[3] by Nikita. His commit message says that this was "dead code", but I don't see what was wrong with it. The result of all of this is that we have a naming convention for anonymous classes that is not only inconsistent with an existing feature of the language, but has little in the way of reasoning behind its current format. My patch[4] aims to save userland from this mess by hiding the entire suffix wherever anonymous classes' names are to be displayed. This means that all anonymous classes will show as "class@anonymous" (which I'd happily change to "{class}" in keeping with "{closure}") in userland, with no way of retrieving the internal name; not even using ReflectionClass. My reasoning is that users should never need to know the underlying names; if a class has a distinct name, then it's not really *anonymous*, is it? Kind regards, Steve [1] https://wiki.php.net/rfc/anonymous_classes#internal_class_naming [2] http://git.php.net/?p=php-src.git;a=commitdiff;h=2a1b0b1#patch1 [3] http://git.php.net/?p=php-src.git;a=commitdiff;h=4a7061b#patch1 [4] https://github.com/php/php-src/compare/master...stevenhilder:hide-anon-class-suffix