On 17 March 2025 07:11:23 GMT, Rob Landers <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>namespace Outer;
>
>class Inner {}
>
>And
>
>class Outer {
> class Inner {}
>}
>
>These would both resolve to the same class name for Outer\Inner.
That's the frame challenge: is that actually a good thing, because it makes the description of
nested types a lot simpler?
> Which one it resolves to would depend on how you implement autoloading
That's just the same as having the same class defined in two files on disk - PHP doesn't
know which will be used until an autoloader runs.
From what I understand of the proposal, the calling code won't know anything different based on
it being "nested" or "namespaced", it will just see a class with a long name
with some punctuation in.
> Then there becomes the question of either letting user-land implement the autoloading changes,
> or have php walk “up” the namespace chain in the hopes it implements an inner class.
I think it should be left to the implementation - PHP makes no assumption about one class per file
anyway, so am implementation could already do this with a namespace{} block.
It is a reasonable point that the convention for when an autoloader should walk up, and how far,
would need to be defined. Then again, I'm increasingly convinced autoloading is a dead-end for
the language, and hope to see more enhancements to preloading and a module system instead.
> So, maybe, it could be useful to use \ but in the long run, I’m not sure it makes sense.
I rather think the other way round: in the short term, a new separator would save users a bit of
pain with autoloading, but in the long run it will look like a weird anomaly that no other language
needs.
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]