namespaces

[pierce]

Hi,

I keep hearing a lot of FUD about PHP's function declarations sharing a global namespace, and this being a problem.

Particularly, I've heard the claim that including modules opens you up to someone else having redefined a function you may have already defined, or that another module author may have defined, or even a base language function.

Is this true? Even if you give all your functions prefixes to guard against this, are you always vulnerable to this being a problem if someone else's module is ill-behaved in this regard?

Except for the PEAR style guide recommending prefixing your function names, I can't find much mention of this in the PHP world, but PHP's critics make it out to be a big deal, and I'm trying to understand that difference.

Thanks.

[Shrike]

You can't redefine functions in PHP, you will just get an error saying the function is already defined. Classes provide a namespace of sorts, since you can have different classes with the same functions (i.e. polymorphism).