On 17 March 2025 18:05:49 GMT, Bob Weinand <bobw...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>I have not grasped any single argument in favour of \, except "other languages
>are doing it too", "existing tooling splitting on backslash would continue to
>work" and "we could use the existing use statement as is".
This wording feels a bit disingenuous - clearly, you *can* grasp some
advantages. It's fine if you don't think those advantages outweigh the
disadvantages, but that's different from believing they don't exist.
In other words, it's like the famous Monty Python joke:
> All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public
> order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have
> the Romans ever done for us?
>Also, just because other languages are doing a mistake, it does not mean we
>have to repeat it. They are generally doing it because their identifier
>separator is universal and it's consistent. It does not mean that it's without
>its own problems.
Absolutely, but where there's a wide adoption of a particular pattern or style,
it's worth at least asking whether we're making things better or worse by doing
something different.
If we look at that, and decide we can do something better, great!
>Using the double colon is a very minor BC break (accessing a class by a class
>constant value?! That's also quite inconsistent that it works at all, as you
>can't do that with normal constants, only class constants.).
>Using another sigil would also be possible (like :>). But for the backslash I
>only see drawbacks.
>
>Also, nothing precludes us from allowing "use Foo\Bar::Inner;".
Personally, I would be equally happy with either \ or :: and less happy with
anything that required us choosing yet another set of punctuation, for what is
otherwise quite a minor feature in its language impact.
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]
