Re: Not autoloading functions

On Fri, 20 Jan 2017 10:04:44 +0300, Rasmus Schultz <rasmus@mindplay.dk> wrote:

Just a quick thought. Since the autoloading functions proposal is stalled, how about allowing for import of static functions instead?

    use function Foo::bar;

    bar(); // calls Foo::bar()

There are two benefits to this approach: 1. There is immediate support for autoloading without any need for adoption or support in existing autoloaders. 2. Pseudo-namespaces (abstract classes with stateless static functions) are already widely practiced in PHP - a lot of existing code would be supported as is. The syntax when calling functions would be the same. If we had function autoloading, we would likely collect related functions in a file anyway - putting them in a class instead gives more less the same exact result. The only drawback I can see, is the inability to import a whole set of functions with one statement - but being explicit about external imports is widely considered best practice for classes and interfaces, so why not for functions. Yeah, it's a bit inconvenient, but at least we can move ahead and leverage existing code without changes or BC breaks. It's not all bad. It's better than nothing perhaps? :-) Thoughts?

Maybe we might think about modules this time? Lots of languages use this approach and they seem to be pretty happy with it. Here's how it could look like, very abstractly. I don't really see any big issues with the way how to implement it either. https://gist.github.com/nikita2206/2e4ab1b314e840f93ed75a0b88266d35