Hello internals,
I have significantly revamped the RFC (again). Key changes to the RFC:
1. More (realistic) examples,
2. Since enums are basically specialized classes, they are allowed to be nested
as well (hat tip to Reddit),
3. Using backslash as the class separator,
4. Proper scoping (and shadowing),
5. Nesting is allowed in interfaces and enums as well as classes; but not
traits,
6. (Hopefully) Clearer wording,
7. Nesting in traits, or nested traits, are future scope,
8. Nested interfaces are future scope too.
Some benefits of using \ as a separator:
- a simple name can refer to nested classes:
Scope resolution was expanded to treat inner classes within the same class as
“in scope.” This provides a more natural usage:
class Outer {
class Inner {}
public function foo(Inner $inner) {}
}
- Standard “use” statements can alias them:
use Outer\Inner as Inner;
But it also has some draw backs:
- The engine doesn’t know that Outer\Inner is a nested class and autoloaders
will have to account for that. It will only ask for Outer\Inner.
- You cannot simply refer to parent:>Inner, you have to explicitly ask for the
parent by name: SomeParentClass\Inner.
A draft implementation (which is more of a proof-of-concept) is available on
GitHub.
