PHP Namespaces Oddities
It’s time for flame!I have a strange relationship with PHP: I hate it even if it has served me well and still pays my bills!
I have to admit that I’m not a PHP purist, and my applications tend to be quite simple and modular. Since a couple of years I progressively started using namespaces.
After all, how hard can it be?
I’ve used namespaces in pretty much every language, ranging from C++ to my beloved Perl.
But the way PHP implements namespaces is … ugly!
Why?
The first reason is that when you are in a namespace everything outside the namespace must be fully qualified. Let’s see this in action:
namespace fluca1978\database;
class Driver {
public function connect() {
// get an object outside of the namespace
$query = new \Query;
}
}
\Query instead of Query? Because once I’m in the namespace, any reference is supposed to be within the very same namespace.
This produces a lot of runtime errors in my applications because I simply forget somewhere to
\ global names, and that is bad to me!
Reason number two: when you need to use a namespace, you have to repeat the trailing part.
Let’s see this in action:
use namespace fluca1978\database;
...
$driver = new \database\Driver;
\database part of the namespace since I’m already use-ing it? Why is it not importing the new names into the local namespace?
Conclusions
I’m sure PHP has strong reasons for implementing the namespace resolution in such a dirty way, and I could guess it has something to do with backward compatibility.Being used to other languages namespaces, I could say this is not what I expect to be from a
namespace and use directives. Clearly I’m not the PHP mood about namespaces!