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"Half-ass Solution"

The PHP internals team could have pushed 5.3 out the door last November with :: as the separator. It was in the alpha. It worked. Except it didn't. If they had pushed it out then, knowing it broke down, that's a half-ass solution.

They changed it. They made it right. It pushed the release back by over half a year. That's hardly half-assed.

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They made the easy choice -- add a character to the language so the parser has something else to grab onto so they can treat static class access and namespace access as different things.

I don't call that making it right. It made it "work". Adding another confusing symbol to a language already filled with symbols is not right.

They could have actually fixed the original problem that made it not work to begin with, too.

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