Request for Comments: How to write RFCs

• Version: 1.0
• Date: 2008-03-06
• Author: Lars Strojny lstrojny@php.net
• Status: Work in progress
• First Published at: none

This RFC discusses the transition to real namespaces for internal classes in e.g. ext/spl.

Currently internal classes are inconsistently named. Just take a look at SPL:

• RecursiveIterator
• RecursiveIteratorIterator
• RecursiveRegexIterator
• RegexIterator
• RuntimeException
• SeekableIterator
• SimpleXMLIterator
• SplFileInfo
• SplFileObject
• SplObjectStorage
• SplObserver

Some of the classes in ext/spl are prefixed with “Spl”, some are not. To avoid naming collisions and as a structural element, namespaces were introduced in PHP 5.3. This gives us a chance to move all the Spl-classes in appropriate namespaces. Take a look at the following transitions:

• RecursiveIterator: Spl::Iterator::Recursive
• RecursiveIteratorIterator: Spl::Iterator::Recursive::Iterator
• RecursiveRegexIterator: Spl::Iterator::Recursive::RegexIterator
• RegexIterator: Spl::Iterator::Regex
• RuntimeException: Spl::Exception::Runtime
• SimpleXMLIterator: Spl::Iterator::SimpleXML
• SplObserver: Spl::Observer::Observer
• SplSubject: Spl::Observer::Subject
• SplFileInfo: Spl::File::Info
• SplFileObject: Spl::File::Object
• SeekableIterator: Spl::Iterator::Seekable

The hardest part of the proposal is to find a way not to break backwards compatibility. The old names will be present in PHP 5.3 and will be removed in PHP 6.