Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:113517
To: internals@lists.php.net
References: <DM6PR07MB66189850774C52F7F93989B2F96E9@DM6PR07MB6618.namprd07.prod.outlook.com>
 <ff3a7975-770e-2a63-57e8-553fb1fad0ae@gmail.com>
 <DM6PR07MB6618FF75EE682D7C38E128A0F96D9@DM6PR07MB6618.namprd07.prod.outlook.com>
Message-ID: <d42650e2-6c51-8177-d2c7-5d84783f3bc7@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2021 16:20:45 +0000
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101
 Thunderbird/78.8.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
In-Reply-To: <DM6PR07MB6618FF75EE682D7C38E128A0F96D9@DM6PR07MB6618.namprd07.prod.outlook.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-Language: en-GB
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] RFC: Add `println(string $data = ''): int`
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Tommins)

On 14/03/2021 15:52, tyson andre wrote:

> There's also the alias fputs ofhttps://www.php.net/manual/en/function.fwrite.php
> which also returns the byte count.


Notably, like printf(), that is borrowed directly from C, and probably 
dates from a time when most PHP programmers were also C programmers. 
That time is long past.


> Annoyingly, any decision I make would be inconsistent with something


I'm not sure why you're casting your net so wide. The name and use cases 
for this function put it squarely next to "print" and "echo" in my mind, 
and it would never occur to me to ask if it was consistent with most of 
the functions you've mentioned.


> It definitely would be longer to use `println((string)$foo)`,
> but there may be cases where that would be done,
> e.g. if you are writing a script that would be reviewed/modified/used by
> programmers that are more familiar with languages that aren't PHP.
> (It'd be more readable using 1 output method than 3)


Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean here. What 3 output methods are you 
talking about, and how does println((string)$foo) make a difference to them?


> There's also `println("$foo");`


Which is still marginally longer than the existing print "$foo\n";


> Static analyzers for PHP such as Phan warn about the unused result of multiplication
> to catch cases like this, and other analyzers can easily add this check if they don't already check for it.
> https://github.com/phan/phan/wiki/Issue-Types-Caught-by-Phan#phannoopbinaryoperator


That doesn't stop it being a nasty surprise. People will want to use 
"print" and "println" interchangeably, and making that difficult because 
they have different syntax is going to end up on lists of "things I hate 
about PHP", no matter how easily tools can spot it.


>> if ( something() && println($foo) && somethingElse() )  // does what it
>> looks like, if println is a normal function
>> if ( something() && print($foo) && somethingElse() )  // does not print
>> $foo, because the expression passed is actually ($foo)&&somethingElse()
> The fact that `print` doesn't require parenthesis is something that surprised me initially,


Just to be clear, it is not that print doesn't *require* parentheses, 
it's that print does not have parentheses, ever.


> though changing it to force it to use function syntax would be a much larger bc break
> more suitable for a major version, that I don't expect to pass.


It hadn't even occurred to me to suggest that. I was suggesting the 
opposite: if we add something called "println", it should have identical 
syntax and behaviour to "print". The only difference should be the extra 
newline character in the output.


Regards,

-- 
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]