PHP namespaces become much better

Recently noted by Derick Rethans in an informative blog post, there is (now was) a problem in the implementation of namespaces in the soon-to-be-released PHP 5.3. I quote:

Take for example this code:

In PHP 5.3 this would alias the class Interval in the namespace PEAR::Date to the class Interval. For now, this code would work just fine. However, if PHP would introduce a class "Interval" at some point in the future (and PHP can do this as it owns the global namespace) then the above code would suddenly stop working.

This morning, I realized that this would be very easy to fix, and posted a patch to internals@ with a brief explanation. Dmitry committed a fix to PHP_5_3 and HEAD very quickly. The issue raised by Derick is now obsolete, making namespaces not just more useful, but even more powerful than they were.

(more...)