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/
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