Re: [PHP-DEV] [Concept] declare(strict_identifiers=1)

On Wed, Aug 26, 2026, at 2:42 PM, [email protected] wrote:

> The survey answers a different question: if a maintainer adds the declare
> to a file they already have, does it still compile? That is adoption
> friction, not breakage. It is also a calibration check -- a rule that
> rejected a lot of legitimate existing code would be the wrong rule, and I
> wanted to know that before proposing it rather than after.
>
>  > Do I understand it correctly that by adding that declare to 168604 you
>  > would uncover a single risky identifier? Not that convincing...
>
> That number is the cost, not the benefit, and I should have separated the
> two more clearly.
>
> The single Packagist finding is what would stop compiling: symfony/cache
> declares a class whose entire name is the single byte 0xA9. That is the
> whole measured adoption cost across the 250 most-installed packages.

If this is so rarely seen in the wild (something that should be verified with more than 250 packages), why make it an option?  Just plan that PHP 9 will enforce UTF-8-or-GTFO rules on identifiers, Symfony updates one oddball class, and we move on with life.  99.99% of developers won't notice anything happened.

--Larry Garfield