On Tue, Jul 23, 2024, at 2:41 PM, Christoph M. Becker wrote: > On 23.07.2024 at 16:04, Larry Garfield wrote: > >> On Tue, Jul 23, 2024, at 1:42 PM, Matthew Weier O'Phinney wrote: >> >>> On Fri, Jul 19, 2024 at 12:41 PM Gina P. Banyard <intern...@gpb.moe> wrote: >>> >>>> I have opened the vote for the mega deprecation RFC: >>>> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecations_php_8_4 >>> >>> The section "Deprecate using a single underscore ''_'' as a class name" >>> indicates that probably the primary reason to deprecate it is a >>> potential future conflict in the pattern matching RFC, where it can be >>> used as a wildcard. >>> >>> However, I see no mention of this character as a wildcard anywhere in that >>> RFC. >>> >>> Can somebody clarify? >> >> The pattern matching RFC previously listed _ as a wildcard character. >> >> In the discussion a month ago, someone pointed out that `mixed` already >> serves that exact purpose, so having an extra wildcard was removed. >> >> However, a few people indicated a desire to have an explicit wildcard _ >> anyway, even if it's redundant, as it's a more common and standard approach >> in other languages. We've indicated that we are open to making that an >> optional secondary vote in the pattern matching RFC if there's enough >> interest (it would be trivial), though I haven't bothered to add it to the >> RFC text yet. >> >> Having _ available could also be used in other "wildcard" or "ignore this" >> cases, like exploding into a list assignment or similar, though I don't >> believe that has been fully explored. >> >> That's the context/background here. Whether that encourages you to vote for >> or against that section I leave as an exercise for the reader. > > Well, I wonder how that is supposed to work. Assuming the underscore > would be used as wildcard in a class name context, that could only be > done after using that character as class name is no longer allowed. So > that would have to wait for the next major PHP version (at least). > > Note that I'm not worried about no longer being able to use an > underscore as class name, but rather that this introduces another > inconsistency to our indentifiers. Disallowing an underscore as > function name is obviously off the table, thanks to gettext. > > Christoph
I think someone checked and found no examples of someone using _ as a class name, so the impact of removing it and/or using it for something else would be nearly nil. That may still push _ as a wildcard out to a future version, but I leave that up to others. As I said, I don't have strong feelings either way. --Larry Garfield
