Even with the release of PHP 5.3 looming closer and closer on the horizon, there's a few things that are still being worked through - one of which is the much touted namespace support. Elizabeth Smith has posted a few of the issues that she's having with how they're being implemented, four and a half of them, to be exact.

The first thing to clarify is that I like the new implementation overall, it's fairly light and although it isn't really namespacing or packaging in any sense of the word, the best way to describe it is aliasing, it does help keep code easy to use. In fact I have a couple of projects and even a PHP extension that's all namespaced code.

Her list of five (four and a half) things are:

• multiple namespaces in a file
• you can't have ANYTHING before the namespace statement but an opening <?php tag
• The autoload and resolution paths
• Functions in namespaces
• No use * and three million use statements (this is the one with the workaround - class_alias)