On: PHP: \ as namespace separator. What were they thinking?

[randallsquared]

> generated code

Not a problem: either the PHP generated is only safe for a particular version, or they can add parenthesis to distinguish the cases.

> to convert stuff to explicit true/false

I suppose. That would seem like a surprising use to me, and would merit an explanatory comment, but given that, it might be better to just explicitly cast ("(bool)$name"), which saves the comment, and only adds four characters over "!!$name".

[qqq → randallsquared]

Every syntax quirk that requires the code generator to do something (e.g. add more parentheses) makes code generation harder.

[randallsquared → qqq]

I would naively expect every single expression to be surrounded by parenthesis by default, implemented in the lowest level writeExpression() function or whatever. But I've never written a translator, so...