What are the historical reasons for choosing "::" over "\" for namespace addressing in PHP?

The historical reason for choosing "::" over "\" for namespace addressing in PHP is due to the fact that "\" is used as an escape character in PHP strings. This could lead to conflicts and confusion when trying to use "\" for namespace addressing. As a result, the decision was made to use "::" as the namespace separator in PHP.

use MyNamespace\MyClass;

$obj = new MyClass();