On Wed, Aug 26, 2026, at 2:42 PM, [email protected] wrote: > The survey answers a different question: if a maintainer adds the declare > to a file they already have, does it still compile? That is adoption > friction, not breakage. It is also a calibration check -- a rule that > rejected a lot of legitimate existing code would be the wrong rule, and I > wanted to know that before proposing it rather than after. > > > Do I understand it correctly that by adding that declare to 168604 you > > would uncover a single risky identifier? Not that convincing... > > That number is the cost, not the benefit, and I should have separated the > two more clearly. > > The single Packagist finding is what would stop compiling: symfony/cache > declares a class whose entire name is the single byte 0xA9. That is the > whole measured adoption cost across the 250 most-installed packages.
If this is so rarely seen in the wild (something that should be verified with more than 250 packages), why make it an option? Just plan that PHP 9 will enforce UTF-8-or-GTFO rules on identifiers, Symfony updates one oddball class, and we move on with life. 99.99% of developers won't notice anything happened. --Larry Garfield
