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0 pointsLawnGnome13y ago0 comments

Unfortunately, the obvious answer (parse code in the C locale) breaks code that's in the wild and relies on PHP's undocumented locale-specific case-insensitivity.

Obviously, case-insensitive identifiers are a bad idea, but PHP is stuck with them at this point.

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Tloewald13y ago

I don't think it's "obvious" at all. The problems caused by case sensitive identifiers are legion, especially in dynamic languages with implicit declaration. It's not at all clear to me that this problem is of case insensitive identifiers and not simply in PHP's implementation.

Udo13y ago

Changing the case insensitivity of PHP identifiers is a good idea. I suspect breakage would be minimal and easily fixable. One has to keep in mind that variable names are already case sensitive in PHP, and most (reasonably good) code I've seen in the wild does honor the spelling of class and method names.

Of course it will never happen, but I really think this would be a great idea for the next major version. Backwards compatibility is important but not at all costs. A language needs to remain agile enough to allow for the recognition of (and ultimately the fixing of) mistakes.

Xylakant13y ago

I doubt that breakage would be minimal. I'm not as certain as you that most code does honor the spelling of class and method names, but even if we assume that this is the case I'd assume that there are tons of undetected errors. Currently, there's just no way to test that you're using the proper spelling, so nobody does.

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