Hi!
first up i am a bit irritated by the use of the term "internal class", i guess you both mean to say "class in the global namespaces"?
I can't tell what Greg meant for him, but for me the problem exists regardless of the class being internal or not.
imho the thing is, that the person who is developing a namespace that is autoloadable knows this (or should know this), as a result its his obligation to either trigger the autoload via a "use" statement or by prepending the current namespace name to the class name.
Namespaces aren't autoloadable, classes are. But what I see happening is that people would start converting excisting code, and since they are human they will inevitable forget or miss class here and there. And it would work, and pass all tests, and look fine and dandy on the outside - but under the water it would contain the performance bomb of non-cacheable exhaustive autoload search. It is a big disservice for our users to put them into this situation where you need to be an expert to even notice where the problem is - especially that we *already* know the problem exists and we *know* how to fix it. Why not just fix it?
imho the main use for namespaced code will be libraries and not application level code (with the exception that some people have mentioned that they might want to stick their templates in namespaces), so i think this burden is legit, since most of us spend their time writing application level code and not library code (sorry full time ezc/zf developers).
That doesn't matter - applications would contain private libraries as part of the function, which would contain namespaces. Look at big application like Magento - there's definitely potential for huge use of namespaces inside the application. Namespaces aren't by no means limited to off-the-shelf libraries - I see much use of them precisely in the custom code in big projects.
But the more important issue here is that we KNOW there's a problem. Why should we look for reasons to diminish its importance when we have a fix for it, which most of the target audience would accept?
so imho the solution is "none of the above". the solution is that however wants to make his namespaced code to be autoloadable must make sure he explicitly triggeres the autoloading.
There's no such thing as "autoloadable" or "not autoloadable" code in PHP now. So I'm afraid I miss what you trying to tell - do you say we should stay with what we have now? Or do something else?
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