Re: Why change require_once? A brief explanation of motives

Alan Knowles wrote:

How am I supposed to lazy load an the Exception implementation by just relying on require_once?

depending on how you use Exceptions (control flow or in exceptional situations) require_once 'MyPackage/Exception.php; throw new MyPackage_Exception_FileNotFound($thefile);

Well, I do not think that this really qualifies as a good solution.

So far the only justification that is currently not been explored for this change is "enables more flexibility" - Could you explain how it would enable that? and why that flexibility would be useful and commonly used. I can not see any amazing flexibility, only more problems.

I think I just posted some examples of how this is useful, short summary plus a few extra from the top of my head: - being able to gracefully handle missing classes - being able to shorten the include path in case for some reason you end up having a lot of entries in your include path - getting rid of stat calls (I know we need new benchmarks on the relevance of this one) - wanting to add some logging/debugging at class load time regards, Lukas