No. You can set a variable after declaring a namespace, but variables will always exist in the global scope. They are never bound to namespaces. You can deduce that from the absence of any name resolution descriptions in
- FAQ: things you need to know about namespaces (PHP 5 >= 5.3.0)
There would also be no allowed syntax to locate variables in a namespace.
print \namespace\$var; // syntax error
print "${namespace\\var}"; // "unexpected T_NS_SEPARATOR"