On 10-Nov-06, at 12:41 PM, Sean Coates wrote:
I don't think namespaces are a magic bullet. As it stands, it's
impossible to use namespaces without a third party patch that may
or may
not work. I strongly believe that if namespaces are implemented in PHP
6, most of our prefixing/symbol collisions will go away as people
migrate. It's much easier to track down a failed import than to
comment
out a function declaration in the PHP source.
PHP 6 is not yet out and probably won't be production quality for
quite some time. Which means that migration to it en mass is probably
not going to happen this decade :-). If we take 5.x adoption as a
benchmark it took it over 2 years to even reach the 10% mark and big
PHP apps still (with good reason) focus on the much larger PHP 4
market. Namespacing core classes/function would be a supremely bad
idea as it could quite literally break every single application. You
also need to consider that until PHP X attains at least 50% or more
market penetration few people would be willing to write applications
that require this version of PHP to work. This is why many of the
projects and companies I am familiar still write new code in PHP 4
rather then in PHP 5, despite that version having numerous perceived
advantages.
I also don't deny that there will be a minor performance hit. There
are
a ton of other things in PHP that reduce performance.. the idea is to
find a balance of which ones are worth it (as we did with OOP and
Unicode), and I believe that namespaces are worth it. I also know that
I'm not alone in this.
I think adoption rates speak for themselves, I think there is far
more demand for a fast & stable PHP then for syntatic sugar features
which seem extremely useful, but in the end prove to carry too much
baggage.
Ilia Alshanetsky
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