Deprecate scanner functionality (4.0), drop it (5.0) in favor of

[weierophinney]

Basically, parsing via regexes is simply not acceptable/viable anymore, and absolutely doesn't scale, as the syntax of PHP keeps changing.

@asgrim has been building https://github.com/Roave/BetterReflection since last year, and the library is stable/mature, so I'd suggest that we chop the head off this part of zend-code's functionality.

Thoughts?

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Originally posted by @Ocramius at zendframework/zend-code#91

[weierophinney]

No problem here, that's the sort of thing BR can do I believe (though I'm not intimately familiar with the scanner here). If there is missing functionality in BR, I'm happy to take PRs or feature requests.

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Originally posted by @asgrim at zendframework/zend-code#91 (comment)

[weierophinney]

I'm 👍 for this. While I've been happy we've had this feature in zend-code, it's difficult to maintain, and, particularly with the fast pace of language additions/changes, hard to keep up-to-date. The only way we could accomplish that is with a rewrite to use an AST and/or tokenization approach (the latter of which BR uses, IIRC), which would be a significant undertaking. Since another tool exists, I'd be happy to point folks to that instead.

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Originally posted by @weierophinney at zendframework/zend-code#91 (comment)

[Ocramius]

Dropped directly in 4.0 via #58 - the scanners were completely unusable on PHP 8.0.0+ codebases anyway