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Date: Wed, 7 Aug 2019 15:57:02 -0400
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To: Nicolas Grekas <nicolas.grekas+php@gmail.com>
Cc: "G. P. B." <george.banyard@gmail.com>, PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] [VOTE] Deprecate PHP's short open tags, again
From: chasepeeler@gmail.com (Chase Peeler)

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On Wed, Aug 7, 2019 at 1:14 PM Nicolas Grekas <nicolas.grekas+php@gmail.com=
>
wrote:

> Le mar. 6 ao=C3=BBt 2019 =C3=A0 13:34, G. P. B. <george.banyard@gmail.com=
> a =C3=A9crit :
>
> > The voting for the "Deprecate short open tags, again" [1] RFC has begun=
.
> > It is expected to last two (2) weeks until 2019-08-20.
> >
> > A counter argument to this RFC is available at
> > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/counterargument/deprecate_php_short_tags
> >
> > Best regards
> >
> > George P. Banyard
> >
> > [1] https://wiki.php.net/rfc/deprecate_php_short_tags_v2
>
>
>
> The counter-arguments are a really nice addition to the process.
>
> Reading them made me think there is a big missing "pro" argument: perceiv=
ed
> complexity of the engine.
>
> When there is no choice to make (short tags on/off, magic_quote on/off,
> etc), then there is only one thing to teach, one thing to learn, one thin=
g
> to (not have to) agree on when deciding for some conventions, etc.
>
> When there are N binary options (and not all options are binary), there a=
re
> 2^N things to teach, learn, etc.
>
> In this case, claiming a slippery-slope is a logical fallacy. We aren't
talking about opening it up so that we can add even more opening tags in
the future. The odds are pretty much zero that keeping short tags would
lead to it in the future. We're talking about two possible ways to begin a
block of PHP code. <? and <?php. Pretty much everyone (if not actually
everyone) that is against this RFC has stated that they don't actually use
short tags, and do not advocate that anyone else use them either.


> That's a major cost put on the community. Choices that were made years ag=
o
> when PHP was not what it is today were certainly fine, but nowadays, this
> imposes significant a burden on everyone. Each option individually are
> maybe minor, but the 2^N becomes quickly big. I think we should make such
> things way simpler so that we can free the brains of many to do the next
> things that matter.
>
> I think the cost put on the community to fix existing instances of short
tags is a MUCH higher burden than asking them know about the existence of
short tags should they encounter them one day. I'm in charge of maintaining
a very large legacy code base. The majority of the legacy code is "leave it
alone code" that is slowly getting re-written. The code is horrendous.
Things have broken in the past from running PhpStorm's auto-formatting on a
file. The effort required to update all of that code in order to upgrade
would be so high that it's likely I would never get approval from my
superiors to spend that much time on it.


> I don't have a vote, but if I were I would vote "yes". Instead, I encoura=
ge
> "no"-voters to reconsider, and others to vote "yes" too :)
>
> Cheers,
> Nicolas
>


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Chase Peeler
chasepeeler@gmail.com

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