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A comment on An Exceptional Change in PHP 7.0. Parent comment

Re:An Exceptional Change in PHP 7.0 by ufo on Monday October 05, 2015 @08:22PM (#10335986)
I still don't get what stopped them from using any of the existing operators.
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Re:An Exceptional Change in PHP 7.0 by teh_klev on Monday October 05, 2015 @09:06PM (#10336163)
Rationale was discussed on IRC, see:

https://wiki.php.net/_media/rfc/php.ns.txt

Linked to at the bottom of:

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/namespaceseparator

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Re:An Exceptional Change in PHP 7.0 by ufo on Monday October 05, 2015 @09:48PM (#10336318)
I skimmed through it but couldn't really understand why they couldn't coopt one of the existing operators (for example, by making classes have a namespace for their methods)

Couldn't they provide a clearer explanation than simply dumping a huge IRC log like that??

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Re:An Exceptional Change in PHP 7.0 by wvenable on Monday October 05, 2015 @10:34PM (#10336442)
Basically namespaces operate at a different level. You can almost imagine it like Macro expansion -- the namespaces are fully resolved for all the symbols in the file and then the compilation happens. This is necessary for a host of reasons. They can't co-opt an existing operator because all the existing operators work at an entirely different level.
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