ZendEngine2/RFCs/002.txt

[Cross-posted between engine2 and pear-dev since this message mostly touches PEAR topics.] There are a few comments in RFC 002 (lines starting with "#") that I'd like to get opinions on (pear-dev: check out ZendEngine2 from cvs.zend.com, see RFCs/002.txt). I expect some controversy around the "Name:Space:blah" syntax, so just shoot me with it right now :-) Also, I have not included anything about loading namespaces yet. The reason is that as I was writing that section, I suddenly remembered that I never decided on how it should be done with respect to PEAR, so some ideas around that would be welcome. Here's my problem: Today, PEAR basically maps between files and classes, you get the HTML_Table class when you include "HTML/Table.php". Introducing namespaces, it would make the most sense to change the HTML_Table class to HTML:Table (class Table in the HTML namespace). But that means the HTML/Table.php file would define symbols in the "HTML" namespace, not "HTML:Table" as you might expect. Okay, we might live with that, but what if you also have some functions or constants in HTML/Table.php? Since namespaces are per-file, they'd also end up in the HTML namespace, which is definitely what you'd be interested in (they could basically clash with any other HTML_Something package. I can see four ways of dealing with this: 1. Allow mid-file namespaces changes that would allow a file to contain: namespace Foo; class Bar ... namespace Foo:Bar; constants ... 2. Change the entire PEAR class<->file scheme to a class<->namespace scheme. This would be pretty ugly, we'd end up with fully qualified class names such as "HTML_Table:Table" or "HTML:Table:Table". 3. Make a namespace "instantiatable" like I suggested a month or two ago. This is what Perl/CPAN ended up doing, probably for the same reasons I'm losing hair over this. :-) 4. <your brilliant idea goes here> Help! :-) - Stig -- Stig Sæther Bakken <ssb@alltheweb.com> Fast Search & Transfer ASA, Trondheim, Norway