Lester Caine wrote on 29/04/2016 14:18:
But where will annotations like @range(0,110) fit in the new model?
Along with the likes of '@notnull' and similar annotations that are also
currently being planned to be spread around the rest of the code? If a
variable is defined via the metadata as 'not null', then assigning null
to it is an error
Hi Lester,
Do you mean you are currently using these attributes / annotations with
a reflection library to generate assertions in the code and throw errors
at runtime? If so, yes, the native syntax will be used for that going
forward, once the tools catch up (though they're likely to provide
backwards compatibility modes for a fairly long time).
However, there's no support built into the core for doing the actual
checks now, and there's no plan (that I know of) to build one in in
future. All that's proposed is to add more support in the language for a
general syntax which can be used by such tools, to avoid them doing so
much string parsing.
If you're just using these annotations for documentation (as your
references to phpDocumentor imply), then nothing will change: you'll
still be able to use them for that, and they still won't be enforced.
This is exactly the same as has been true since PHP 5.0 for argument
types; the engine never validates anything in the docblock, and it might
be completely wrong, and we have separate syntax for actually enforcing
checks:
/**
* @param Foo $foo
*/
function test(Bar $bar) {}
Even if there were no other downsides to the syntax, it would probably
be a bad idea for the core to start enforcing things based on docblocks,
because it would potentially break a lot of code that had them written
wrong. Indeed, it is for precisely this reason that a new syntax is
being proposed for general machine-readable attributes (rather than just
functions for parsing the docblock), so that we can return to seeing
docblocks as just comments, with no meaning for the code.
In short:
- if you're generating documentation from docblocks, it's up to the
program doing the generating what to interpret, and nothing is going to
change that
- if you're generating behaviour from docblocks, it's up to the library
doing the generating what to interpret, and what will change is them
recommending the new dedicated syntax if it's implemented, because it
will be more efficient to process
Regards,
--
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]
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