PHP namespaces

For those of you who are not following the PHP internals mailing list, the namespaces subject has been brought up again, with a simple implementation from Dmitry Stogov.

Its hard to say if it actually gets integrated in the source, as its a touchy subject and many implementations have came before this; but I love the way its implemented.

Quotes from Dmitry:

Namespaces are defined the following way:

namespace Zend::DB;

class Connection {
}

function connect() {
}
?>

Namespace definition does the following:
All class and function names inside are automatically prefixed with namespace name. Inside namespace, local name always takes precedence over global name. It is possible to use the same namespace in several PHP files.
The namespace declaration statement must be the very first statement in file.

Every class and function from namespace can be referred to by the full name
- e.g. Zend::DB::Connection or Zend::DB::connect - at any time.

require 'Zend/Db/Connection.php';
$x = new Zend::DB::Connection;
Zend::DB::connect();
?>

Namespace or class name can be imported:

require 'Zend/Db/Connection.php';
import Zend::DB;
import Zend::DB::Connection as DbConnection;
$x = new Zend::DB::Connection();
$y = new DB::connection();
$z = new DbConnection();
DB::connect();
?>