On Friday 10 August 2007, Stanislav Malyshev wrote: > > Incorrect, a name for a feature should show what kind of > > functionality we implemented. Picking names just for marketing reasons > > "Oh see, PHP has namespaces" is a bad idea. > > I, on the contrary, think it is a good idea to consider perception. > Perception is important, especially for low-barrier language like PHP. > For a language that requires PhD to program in it you can call anything > by any name - PhDs would figure that out. But for language like PHP I > think we should make it as perceptually comfortable as we can. > > My perception is that when people talk about "namespaces" they usually > mean logical separation of things in, well, naming space, and when they > talk "packages" they usually mean files on disk and putting things into > files and finding which thing is in which file. Our implementation is > much more former than the later. Of course, my perception is mine, and > everybody is entitled to have their own ones, but I would very much like > to hear an argument which is not a Siamese twin of "because C++ > namespaces have braces and PHP ones don't". If that would be the only > reason, I don't think it is a good one. If there are more reasons - I > would very much like to hear it before we rush forward and commit things > that would influence PHP for next 10 years.
FWIW, the implementation that was committed feels closest to Java, which calls them packages. The next closest parallel feels like it would be XML, where they're called namespaces. I don't know from C#, so can't say how they map there, and never got far enough in C++ to use namespaces there. I'm OK with either name, really. "Namespace" sounds more like what people are asking for in general (rightly or wrongly), and is how I'd probably end up using them, but I can work with either. -- Larry Garfield AIM: LOLG42 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ: 6817012 "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it." -- Thomas Jefferson -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
