On 17 March 2025 18:05:49 GMT, Bob Weinand <[email protected]> wrote:
>I have not grasped any single argument in favour of \, except "other languages are doing it
>too", "existing tooling splitting on backslash would continue to work" and "we
>could use the existing use statement as is".
This wording feels a bit disingenuous - clearly, you *can* grasp some advantages. It's fine if
you don't think those advantages outweigh the disadvantages, but that's different from
believing they don't exist.
In other words, it's like the famous Monty Python joke:
> All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation,
> roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
>Also, just because other languages are doing a mistake, it does not mean we have to repeat it.
>They are generally doing it because their identifier separator is universal and it's
>consistent. It does not mean that it's without its own problems.
Absolutely, but where there's a wide adoption of a particular pattern or style, it's worth
at least asking whether we're making things better or worse by doing something different.
If we look at that, and decide we can do something better, great!
>Using the double colon is a very minor BC break (accessing a class by a class constant value?!
>That's also quite inconsistent that it works at all, as you can't do that with normal
>constants, only class constants.).
>Using another sigil would also be possible (like :>). But for the backslash I only see
>drawbacks.
>
>Also, nothing precludes us from allowing "use Foo\Bar::Inner;".
Personally, I would be equally happy with either \ or :: and less happy with anything that required
us choosing yet another set of punctuation, for what is otherwise quite a minor feature in its
language impact.
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]