Hey Lars;
On Jul 3, 2008, at 4:07 AM, Lars Strojny wrote:
one thing on my mind is the current naming of our internal classes. I
could say the same for our functions but no, I don't have plans to
save
the universe, saving the world should be enough for now. So I've tried
to dig through the ext/spl-package as an example how to implement
namespaces for internal classes. Also I did it for SPL now, I would go
on further and discuss such changes e.g. for ext/intl.
And here is the resulting
RFC: http://wiki.php.net/rfc/namespaces-for-internal-classes
The RFC is not ready yet but I want to get feedback on it. The
integral
part is the list of renamings and that's fixed, so you can expect a
bit
more prose :)
Having that for 5.3 seems like a good idea, as we have a) a number of
added SPL classes, b) most likely new extensions introducing new
classes
(ext/intl, ext/phar), c) having it is 5.3 would allow us seemless
transistions to newer PHP versions.
+1 on the idea, but I'm not huge on the current naming structure.
Here's just a few things that I would change:
* Completely bike shedding, but does "Recursive" need its own level?
RecursiveArray reads better than having Array at two different levels
to me.
* Again, bike shedding, but I like the name ArrayIterator - it
defines exactly what the class is while Array doesn't convey very
well by itself. You have to look at the full name in order to
understand the process. This also becomes ambiguous when you're
reading the code in PHP. What does "$a = new Array($some_array);"
do? You have to go back to the "uses" declaration at the top to
figure it out. This is true for most of the names I'm seeing here.
Range, Info, Object, Logic, etc. What kind of Range, Info about
what, a plain Object, an ArrayObject, or something else?
You end up with more verbose names by going to a PEAR1 style of
naming convention because you have to use the entire name with the
namespace in order to convey what the code is supposed to be doing.
I would stick with names more closely related to the original names
and add "spl::" (see next comment for lowerspace) to signify that
they're part of SPL. So instead of RecursiveArrayIterator, you have
spl::RecursiveArrayIterator; SplFileInfo becomes spl::FileInfo, etc.
* I would change everything except the final class name in the full
name to be lowercase. Using your existing examples:
Spl::List::DoublyLinked would be spl::list::DoublyLinked, or better
yet spl::DoublyLinkedList, etc. This helps denote what is a class
and what is part of the namespace name. In the original examples,
its ambiguous as to what can be instantiated. Are Spl and Spl::List
classes that can be instantiated? Moving to the lower space
convention makes it easy to denote what is a class and what is just
part of the namespace. This follows the path created by several
other languages.
Thanks for bringing this up. Hopefully we can start using namespaces
in at least some parts of PHP to help promote their best uses
throughout the language.
-T
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