On Wed, 5 Nov 2003, Ilia Alshanetsky wrote: > On November 5, 2003 10:34 am, Christian Schneider wrote: > > PHP is a mix of C, Perl and other styles anyway, why deny it? It's > > strength is that it's a pragmatic and simple language but that doesn't > > mean that nothing should be changed ever. > > PHP strength (IMHO) is it's simple and clear syntax, which allows people who > come from background in other programming languages can quickly recognize and > get used to. Creating confusing alternate syntaxes will bring us ever closer > to Perl 6 where there are dozens of way to do the same thing. The end results > in a confusing and hard to read/write language that all but the most > dedicated of users refuse to use.
Well, like I said before, I am not sure this is a clear case of that. I'm probably the biggest defender around of the no-magic rule, but [] does imply something array-related to most people, so I think the magic part is much smaller than in other proposals we have seen. > That's bull, 5 characters is hard to write? If anything those 5 characters > make it absolutely clear to ANYONE that the data is an array and not an > object or a string or some other type. When I first saw the syntax is took me > a few seconds to realize what it does and the problem would only be > compounded when the code is found within an pre-existing complex script. I do agree that [1,2,3] is not easier to read than array(1,2,3), but I don't think there is a huge difference between the two. I guess we could sample a few newbie users to see what they think $a = [1,2,3]; would do. Of course, then people are going to try to do $a = $b[1,2,3]; and then we are all messed up. -Rasmus -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
