On 23.07.2024 at 16:04, Larry Garfield wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 23, 2024, at 1:42 PM, Matthew Weier O'Phinney wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jul 19, 2024 at 12:41 PM Gina P. Banyard <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> I have opened the vote for the mega deprecation RFC:
>>> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecations_php_8_4
>>
>> The section "Deprecate using a single underscore ''_'' as a class
>> name"
>> indicates that probably the primary reason to deprecate it is a
>> potential future conflict in the pattern matching RFC, where it can be
>> used as a wildcard.
>>
>> However, I see no mention of this character as a wildcard anywhere in that RFC.
>>
>> Can somebody clarify?
>
> The pattern matching RFC previously listed _ as a wildcard character.
>
> In the discussion a month ago, someone pointed out that mixed already serves that
> exact purpose, so having an extra wildcard was removed.
>
> However, a few people indicated a desire to have an explicit wildcard _ anyway, even if
> it's redundant, as it's a more common and standard approach in other languages.
> We've indicated that we are open to making that an optional secondary vote in the pattern
> matching RFC if there's enough interest (it would be trivial), though I haven't bothered
> to add it to the RFC text yet.
>
> Having _ available could also be used in other "wildcard" or "ignore this"
> cases, like exploding into a list assignment or similar, though I don't believe that has been
> fully explored.
>
> That's the context/background here. Whether that encourages you to vote for or against
> that section I leave as an exercise for the reader.
Well, I wonder how that is supposed to work. Assuming the underscore
would be used as wildcard in a class name context, that could only be
done after using that character as class name is no longer allowed. So
that would have to wait for the next major PHP version (at least).
Note that I'm not worried about no longer being able to use an
underscore as class name, but rather that this introduces another
inconsistency to our indentifiers. Disallowing an underscore as
function name is obviously off the table, thanks to gettext.
Christoph