Syntax in PHP 6 View as Markdown

Would my response have been better if it had had a smiley attached?

I've been on both sides of this: as a language user, back in 1998,
and as the developer since then. A lot of times it feels that the
users take a lot for granted and expect the developers to produce a
positive response to their requests. Some go as far as to demand
that the language change according to their wishes. The issue that
Rowan brought up had been discussed multiple times before and the
general consensus has not changed, so saying that "it sucks" is,
while cathartic to some degree, is an exercise in futility. I was
suggesting a better use of his time. :)

That's all I'll say about this.

-Andrei

Maybe you should start a new language. With sensible function names,
and anything else that you may desire. I hear it's a good exercise.

Accepting the risk of starting a flame war where 101 PHP developers
start to
hate me, I feel I should comment on this.

I can't help but think this was a completely pointless email showing a
complete lack of respect to a PHP user. I'm sure he is as nearly
all PHP
users will be, extremely grateful for PHP and the work people like
yourselves
put into the project. Having said this, mails like the one you
just posted
are pointlessly insulting and achieve nothing. It doesn't make you
look
good, in fact, I would suggest emails like this act quite contrary. I
honestly don't want to start a flame war, and as such will not be
drawn into
a war by replying to any replied to this message.

Andrei, I do appreciate your work - honestly I do. I just really do
feel
annoyance when developers publicly show this kind of behaviour.

Kind Regards,

--
Ian P. Christian ~ http://pookey.co.uk

Rowan,

This book should be a good start:

 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1558604421/

HTH,

-Andrei

Andrei, I would if I could!

Unfortunately, I wouldn't know where to begin, having never coded
anything that complicated before.

I've actually written a huge amount of specs for a language, but as I
can't code it, there is little hope.

All I can do is annoy you guys ;)

Maybe you should start a new language. With sensible function names,
and anything else that you may desire. I hear it's a good exercise.

-Andrei

Well, that just sucks. I can only dream...

Rowan Lewis wrote:

I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask, but will there
be any
name changes with functions?

I know it would break everything, but it would also help PHP.

file_get_contetns VS. FileGetContents...

Not going to happen, existing function names will remain as they
are and
the parameter order will also remain the same.

Ilia

--

---

Rowan Lewis (AKA. The Wolf)

--

--

---

Rowan Lewis (AKA. The Wolf)

You'll be a star in a circus.
But internals is certainly not a circus, so please keep your jokes about yourself.

Sara Golemon wrote:

Will your proposal be met with resistence? Certainly. Such an
undertaking represents no small amount of effort and a no less pain when
the final BC break occurs.

No need to break BC! I have a solution. All we need is to introduce
$THAT superglobal object, plus couple of new functions.

define_usual_php_variable($var, 1);
$THAT->va2 = 1; //not recommendedm, gives E_NOTICE

class Bla{
function doSomething(){
$THAT->print($THAT->var);
$THAT->str_sub($THAT->var2);
}
}

[ This message is a joke. A bitter one. ]

--
Wbr,
Antony Dovgal

Nice start (your url (function list) doens't seem to work yet by the way).

Just my 2 cents:

I don't like the '2' at all. I'd rather see nltobr() and dectohex() than
nl2br() and dec2hex(). I do like the idea of loosing all underscores (but I
bet there will be quite a number of developers here who want to keep
underscores). Removing underscores though, would open 2 possibilities:

• studlycaps
• no more randomness in underscore usage in function names (as you so
  wonderfully explained)

Since function names are case insensitive anyway, it won't be a problem at
all, and it'll provide word-boundaries just like underscores do today:

strPos()
arrayMerge()
isInt()
imageCreateFromString()

changes to make this happen:

create alias array_merge() for arrayMerge()
create alias is_int() for isInt()
strpos needs no change, except that it will officially be strPos()
imagecreatefromstring needs no change, except that it will officially be
strPos()

The situation will end up 100% BC and aliases can be removed in PHP 7 or
later.

• Ron

"Michael Cordover" spam_me@mjec.net schreef in bericht
news:43905052.1070208@mjec.net...

Sara Golemon wrote:

I say this with no degree of sarcasm or ill-will: Create a formal
proposal.

Well, you asked for it ;).

Goals:

• remove confusion when a user thinks about a function's name
• develop consistency throughout the language
• be backwards compatible as much as possible

The basic idea began as "rename confusing functions but keep their old
names as aliases to the 'preferred' version with a view to eventually
removing the old ones". Well, let's take a look at a few things. Using a
little bit of counting code and get_defined_functions(), it appears that
there are 510 internal functions containing underscores and 304 which
don't (PHP 5.0.4). The obvious solution appears to be to change all
functions to use underscores.

I went through the function list in an attempt to do just that. Many
functions convert reasonably well - chop() remains chop(),
escapeshellarg() becomes escape_shell_arg(). A fair number, however, were
not quite so friendly. Should fclose() and feof() remain as such or
should they become f_eof() and f_close()? fileatime() to file_atime() or
file_a_time()? Is basename one word or two? There are also a fair number
of functions like nl2br() - nl_2_br() would be silly.

It seems to me, therefore, that we should get rid of the underscores. Yes,
this means changing a lot more functions around, but adding underscores
will just make function names MORE confusing where there's ambiguity - and
that's what we want to remove. It's one of the big complains about PHP,
that ambiguity. Furthermore, we don't want to make substantial changes to
function names - doing things like nl2br() -> nl_to_br() will confuse more
people than necessary and may conflict with existing user-defined function
names.

So, let's list functions and replace out all the underscores. We get:
http://mjec.net/php/functions.html

Well, that's not actually consistent with PHP overall. cal_to_jd()
becomes caltojd() - that should really be cal2jd() to stay consistent. So
lets do that. And at this stage I also added some checking to make sure
there were no functions being duplicated. Well, there was one -
diskfreespace() is an alias of disk_free_space(). That is, however, the
only internal conflict I could find. That listing is at:
http://mjec.net/php/betterfunctions.html

There are a few functions I think need actual renaming, for consistency:
bindec() -> bin2dec()
decbin() -> dec2bin()
octdec() -> oct2dec()
decoct() -> dec2oct()
hexdec() -> hex2dec()
dechex() -> dec2hex()
Those are the only ones I can think of at the moment. If you can think of
any more, please tell me.

So, let's look at where we are now. We can rename all 510
underscore-containing functions to not using their underscores, a
relatively easy transformation. Similarly, changing 'to' to '2' before
killing underscores is trivial. Those bindec() -> bin2dec() etc have to
be done manually. Then alias the old versions to the new function names.

So, if a user knows a function's name they don't have to worry about
underscores any more. The language is consistent with respect to
underscores - there aren't any. But you can still use all the old
function names, so we retain BC. I believe the suggestion was to remove
this by PHP 8, which sounds reasonable.

What's wrong with this proposal? Well, a few things. Firstly, it doesn't
make all function names intuitive - there's still the word order problem.
Secondly, it's a hell of a lot of work to change 510 function names and
then alias them.

Well, the first one just needs someone to go through all 813 distinct
functions (not 814 because diskfreespace() is in there twice) and note
which order they're in, then reorder them. I'll do this when I've got a
bit more time on my hands - probably early next week.

The second bit is fair enough, yes. It might be automatable? I'm not
sure and will look into this once I get a proper internet connection back.

The One Big Argument against the more wide-spread use of PHP is that it
doesn't have consistent function names. If this can be fixed, well, you
bewdy, as we say in .au. All I have to remember is haystack, needle
except in_array() and array_search().

And those are my two cents.

-mjec

http://mine.mjec.net/

It seems to me, therefore, that we should get rid of the underscores.
Yes, this means changing a lot more functions around, but adding
underscores will just make function names MORE confusing where there's
ambiguity - and that's what we want to remove.

Is this some manner of dry humour along the lines of "A Plan for the
Improvement of English Spelling"? I'd rather have the ambiguity..