Hi everybody! Usually constant identifiers are treated case-sensitive in PHP. This is always the case for constants defined via a `const` declaration. However, define() allows to pass TRUE as third argument to define a case-insensitive constant. This feature appears to potentially result in confusion, and also causes bugs as shown in <https://bugs.php.net/74450>. See an example created by Nikita to see some probably unexpected behavior: <https://3v4l.org/L6nCp>.
Even if these issues could be resolved, I still think allowing both case-sensitive and case-insensitive constant identifiers does more harm than good, so either case-sensitive or case-insensitive constant identifiers should be removed from the language. Since case-sensitive constant identifiers are already the default, and HHVM doesn't even support case-insensitive identifiers at all, I would suggest to remove case-insensitive constant identifiers. This could be implemented by triggering E_DEPRECATED whenever the third argument to define() is TRUE in PHP 7.3, and to remove this parameter altogether in PHP 8. Most likely some further simplification in the engine could be done then as well. Thoughts? -- Christoph M. Becker -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
