Hi, I think this proposal has been made before maybe here or discussed elsewhere. Still, I'd like to give my input on the idea.
The basic concept is when a method has the internal access modifier, it can only be called from within the same namespace. The case for this is to protect classes from being used in ways unintended, while still allowing classes within the same namespace to interact with each other non-api methods. I've created a commit: https://github.com/orolyn/php-src/commit/2ddec7149c308a80b33653da31b5ba214f679bb8 Please forgive any mistakes, it is a proof of concept and just complete enough to fulfil the feature. Currently, a limitation is internal methods can only be called from within another scope in the same namespace, as opposed to outside a class. For this implementation I needed to store the namespace of the class during the declaration, so to test that I added the function get_class_namespace to help me iron out some bugs. I have left the function there. Thank you, Dominic
