Slashdot Mirror


PHP Gets Namespace Separators, With a Twist

jeevesbond writes "PHP is finally getting support for namespaces. However, after a couple hours of conversation, the developers picked '\' as the separator, instead of the more popular '::'. Fredrik Holmström points out some problems with this approach. The criteria for selection were ease of typing and parsing, how hard it was to make a typo, IDE compatibility, and the number of characters."

6 of 523 comments (clear)

  1. I have to say they are working really hard.... by A+beautiful+mind · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...to make PHP the most retarded computer programming language on the planet.

    --
    It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
    Be yourself no matter what they say
  2. The BASIC of the 21st century by mangu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I once did a lot of work on PHP. Today, when people ask me for upgrades I just migrate it to Python.

    This unfortunate choice of the escape character for namespace separator is stupid, but seems almost irrelevant to me. How many nails do they need in the PHP coffin to bury it?

  3. Easier on which keyboard layout? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How is it possible for even American developers to be this clueless. Which characters are convenient to type depends entirely on the keyboard layout that is used. Case in point, $ is insanely painful to type on Scandinavian layout.

    If your choice of characters used in your programming language is affected by how easy/hard it is to parse the code, you probably shouldn't be involved in developing a programming language.

  4. Re:WTF? by caluml · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think their decision to use '\' is very very dumb one.

    You've summed up my opinion concisely. That is *truly* retarded to use the (almost?) universal escape character for another reason. Almost as retarded as Microsoft going with \ for a directory separator.

  5. Re:Another fashionable addition for PHP: by chrysalis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    GOTO is what your CPU is actually doing 80% of the time.
    You can pump up your ego by imagining that using a language without something explicitely called "GOTO" makes your code "up with the time". But what you actually do is nothing but GOTOs, just written in a different manner.

    Ironically, the VM that PHP uses is completely GOTO-based (well, you can pick several methods at compile-time, but GOTO is what a lot of distributions chose because performance is often better than CALL and it's very stable nowadays).

    Oh and even JAVA has GOTO and relies a lot on it. The compiler hides an explicit thing called "GOTO", but what you get after compilation is full of GOTO. And it's actually why apps can actually do something.

    Laughing at "GOTO" is ignorance, or just blind trolling because you read somewhere that BASIC had a "GOTO" keyword. I guess in a few years your children will laugh at those horrible "$", "$this", "->", ":" and "\" symbols, that would remind them the old time of a language called PHP. Though you are proud of them now.

    Using temporary variables like "$should_exit", dummy loops just to "break" at the right place, or named loops to work around "break" that would only exit the first loop is nothing but writing "GOTO" in an obfuscated and inefficient way. "GOTO" is not synonym for "spaghetti code" (the famous keyword always used by people blindly repeating that GOTO is bad).

    Oh and grep for "goto" in your Linux kernel or in any BSD operating system. Wow, tons of them. Really. But I guess this is just because these source codes are shits written by people who can barely write GW-BASIC, and of course none of these operating systems actually work. Glad you are there to help. Teach them how to code, tell them that their code is so passé.

    Or shut up.

    --
    {{.sig}}
  6. Re:Another fashionable addition for PHP: by Thuktun · · Score: 5, Insightful

    GOTO is what your CPU is actually doing 80% of the time.

    And your car's engine spends all of its time repeatedly causing small explosions with volatile petroleum.

    The driver is generally recommended to let the engine do this and not try to intervene or do it themselves.