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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Upgrading php
From: rasmus@lerdorf.com (Rasmus Lerdorf)

Todd Ruth wrote:
> I'd been ignoring the "curly braces" thread, but then I grepped my
> code and ... sure enough, I have curly braces that are used to index
> into strings.  I don't care about this philosophically, but it makes
> me wonder about upgrade tools.  I know I shouldn't ask this without
> volunteering to do it myself, but when a version of php comes out
> that makes such a change, is there any chance of having a tool that
> updates the code available at the same time?
> 
> It seems to me that nothing understands php user code better than the
> core php code, so perhaps a tool could be written that uses the guts
> of php as a base.  I suppose there are some IDEs that could do the
> job as well.  Sadly, I still use vi, but I bet if something were written
> for emacs or eclipse, most people (even me) could learn to use it.
> I'm dreading going to php5.  I hear that to avoid warnings/notices
> I'll need to convert a bunch of "var"s to "public"s.  I'll need to
> wrap my "get_class"s with "strtolower"s.  etc.
> 
> It would be so wonderful to throw all my code at a tool that would
> change everything that can be easily changed and give me a list of
> spots I need to look at manually.  A lot of the changes don't take
> an overwhelming amount of time to do myself, but when you think
> about the thousands of users all doing the same conversions, it just
> makes sense for there to be a tool.  It might also have the side
> benefit of reducing long threads about breaking old code.
> 
> Perhaps this already exists and I've missed it.  Perhaps it will
> never exist because it isn't enough fun to write.  Just an idea...

This is what the E_STRICT messages are for.  If you turn them on (in PHP 
5) you will get very specific messages about language-level issues in 
your code.

-Rasmus