Greetings.
First of all, if anyone can direct me to a centralized place that will tell
me what features the developers are considering for PHP 5, I'd appreciate
it.
Secondly, I'd like to make a request for real namespace support (a la Perl
or even Java) in PHP 5. I think this is one of the most important new
features to add.
PEAR has attempted to overcome the restrictions of a language without
namespaces, and a lot of wonderful code has been written in PEAR; but a lot
of artificial requirements are enforced in the PEAR standards that would not
be necessary with namespace support.
It would be great if you binary extensions and PHP code itself, both, could
declare themselves as part of a particular namespace.
In the tradition of Perl, as PHP often follows, scope-resolution operator
(::) would be great tokens in a namespace. I know this operator is also used
to call class (i.e., static) methods, but the meaning could remain
consistent if a class name is considered a possible final resolution of a
namespace.
In the tradition of Java, multiple scopes could be specified to avoid
namespace collisions. 'net::php::pear' could be a valid namespace,
'net::php::pear::DB' could specify the DB class, and
'net::php::pear::DB::connect' could indicate that the connect class method
should be called. DNS-based namespaces is just an idea; nothing like this
would be enforced, of course, just encouraged to avoid collisions.
With multiple scopes in a namespace, and just a single directory in the
include_path, including files could be greatly simplified. There could be an
INI directive to specify allowable extensions for PHP module files, and the
statement 'use php::pear::DB;' would include the relative path (for example)
"php/pear/DB.phpm". Also 'include' and 'require' could be used for backward
compatibility. Any module that is 'use'd could have an inherent
'include_once' or 'require_once' quality. Including files directly could
also be allowed for backward compatibility.
For a module to declare itself as part of a particular namespace, it could
say: 'namespace php::pear::DB;'. Also, any script could temporarily change
its namespace by the same method.
I admit that I do not help develop any part of the PHP distribution, but I
would be glad to engage anyone in discussion about this feature; and I would
be glad to help with the design of such a feature.
Thanks for your time.
Dean Hall.
--
PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/>
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
