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Date: Thu, 5 May 2016 15:58:20 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Attributes/Annotations Case Study: Drupal
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Collins)

Larry Garfield wrote on 05/05/2016 15:24:
> <<Push($foo >> Translator)>>
>
> <<Pipe($foo|lower|escape)>>
>
> <<Query($foo ?? '//item[id=42]')>>
>
> I could easily see, for instance, Doctrine annotations building the 
> first, PHPUnit the second, and Zend the 3rd.  Those would all be 
> legal-ish, but semantically very different.  And there's also then no 
> guarantee that $foo >> Translator actually means a bit-shift (I don't 
> even know what a bitshift in that case would mean)


To add some context to these examples: the first is borrowing the 
overload of ">>" from C++ (meaning "pass to stream") or similar uses in 
Ruby; the second the use of "|" as a pipe in templating languages like 
Smarty and Twig (meaning "pass expression to modifier function") or good 
old Unix shell tradition; and the third is inspired by PostgreSQL and 
imagines the operator overloaded to mean something like "matches the 
XPath-like expression given".

I'm not sure any of those interpretations would actually be useful in 
the realm of annotations, but operator overloading is the first thing 
that sprung to mind when I wondered what a domain-specific language 
would look like if it were constrained only to producing a valid PHP 
AST. Another trick could be to abuse brackets, e.g. 
"something(anything)" will parse as a function call, but needn't be 
interpreted as one.

Regards,
-- 
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]