Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:89417
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: error (pb1.pair.com: domain garfieldtech.com from 66.111.4.26 cause and error)
To: internals@lists.php.net
References: <CAJGzsHriGp9PoYq++=CBQptFYZQiAsa+yxxN076BHxMQGD6HrA@mail.gmail.com>
 <5654B516.4020700@gmail.com>
 <CAESVnVpe3+9=N5rkcHp2O5cdGuFnt_EQ=sSV8ucpv5w=ox-NaA@mail.gmail.com>
 <CAJGzsHoP5mc2_demfWM3r7exN4qLThANcbcwo9SBydGpvmB1WQ@mail.gmail.com>
 <5655D82A.8020304@lsces.co.uk>
 <CAJGzsHr3XfxRGA8DSkLzAf-8AQvJPu1GMVE30PX=ScygMPgCPQ@mail.gmail.com>
 <5655E4E4.8070200@garfieldtech.com> <5655E61E.3000904@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <5655EAB1.2080507@garfieldtech.com>
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2015 11:06:57 -0600
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.10; rv:38.0)
 Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.0.1
MIME-Version: 1.0
In-Reply-To: <5655E61E.3000904@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Native Annotation Syntax
From: larry@garfieldtech.com (Larry Garfield)

On 11/25/15 10:47 AM, Rowan Collins wrote:
> Larry Garfield wrote on 25/11/2015 16:42:
>> However, doing so would make static checking more difficult; If 
>> annotations become a language-native feature, they should be a 
>> first-class citizen to make it easier for IDEs to handle. 
>
> Could you explain why docblocks are harder to parse than text outside 
> docblocks? As far as I know, IDEs *already* parse docblocks, e.g. 
> using @param and @return for type analysis, so I don't really see why 
> generalising that would be a big problem.

Not being an IDE author I cannot say for certain, so perhaps it's easier 
than I imagine.  However, speaking as a user I would want a robust level 
of static syntax validation of my annotations.  Having robust syntax 
validation show up in *some* parts of my docblock but not others is 
confusing for me as a user; I hypothesize that it would similarly be 
more difficult to selectively treat bits and pieces of the docblock as 
code but not others.  (My current IDE, PHPStorm, parses a docblock to 
validate that it matches the method signature but all it does is tell me 
if the whole thing is valid or not, and if I'm using a "used" class 
name.  It's actually very unhelpful when dealing with complex Doctrine 
annotations like Drupal uses.)

Too, it means that a given annotation directive may have spurious * 
characters inside its string, if it's multi-line.  Sure, that can be 
filtered out (Doctrine already does), but that's one more complication 
to have to consider.

For me, the "sometimes it's code and sometimes it's not, even though it 
looks the same" argument is sufficient to reject docblocks as a location 
for annotations.

-- 
--Larry Garfield