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Comment by phatskat | Hacker News Reader

I actually don’t mind them, and I’ve been out of daily PHP work for a few years now. When I see people denote internal variables with _ or elements with $ in JS, it rubs me the wrong way, but in PHP the $ is kind of nice.

I also prefer the look of ->, it’s _cool_

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Other languages have all sorts of oversized arrows, like ==> and >>>.

-> in PHP and C++ looks clean by comparison.

I'll never forgive them for the brain fart they made of the namespace separator, though.

> I'll never forgive them for the brain fart they made of the namespace separator, though.

You mean the backslash? What's wrong with that?

To someone not already familiar with PHP it looks like you are trying to escape something.

The backslash is universally reserved as an escape character.

It was decided almost 20 years ago so I'm totally used to it and there's no point arguing about it anymore. But the decision to reuse the backslash as a namespace separator still causes inconvenience from time to time. For example, when you write PSR-4 configuration in composer.json, all the backslashes need to be doubled, including (and especially!) the trailing backslash.

What would the alternative for a namespace separator be? The backslashes work well with PSR-4 to give a logical visual of the expected directory structure.

Since PHP takes a lot of syntax from C-like languages, the C++ namespace separator :: would be the obvious choice. Not sure if this conflicted with something in PHP though.

https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.paamayim-nekudot... scope resolution operator

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