Re: do_declare_property()

At 12:41 PM 7/12/00 +0200, waldschrott wrote:

The best is to discuss this before going ahead and implementing it.

I think you´re taking part at this problem, for me (personally), its not easy to find out what´s Zend Tech doing at the moment and in the next days,weeks or months. There is no page/app (I know of) where one can watch where the development of Zend/php will go.

Well right now, there is only maintenance going on when it comes to Zend, mostly by Zeev, Stas and myself and help from the PHP community with bug fixes and build issues (Sascha). You can watch Zend CVS commits by subscribing to zend-cvs@lists.php.net (zend-cvs-subscribe@lists.php.net). It is open to everyone. I think it is very important to freeze development for a while just to get all of the bugs ironed out and there are bugs here and there. Making big changes would lead to a PHP 4.1 or PHP 5 and might have big impacts on initial stability. As 4.0.0 was only released a while ago I prefer ironing out existing issues and not adding more features/bugs.

If there are private/public vars/methods planned, if there´s already a timeframe and so on...

There is nothing "planned". There have been quite a few good ideas (and some not that good) on php-dev and other mailing lists. I would like to see some of these developed in another few months time. The main problem (and advantages) with PHP is that it is a very loosely typed language. That means there is very little you can do at compile time as you have very little information before the script actually starts to run. Implementing things such as public/private vars in an efficient way would have to be done at compile time like in Java/C++. Their life is much much easier because they know EXACTLY what is happening and what type every variable is at compile-time. I believe in order to implement some of the "requests" for advanced programmers will require us to add some new extended syntax to PHP and the programmer would have to code more according to Java/C++ style and less according to PHP style which is extremely dynamic. I think PHP should keep its main strength which is fast development time and that people without programming experience can easily start writing scripts with hours of learning. On the other hand, as time goes by, more professional programmers are using PHP and adding more conservative programming ways for them is not something I oppose. However, it requires a lot of thinking and it will require the programmers who decide they are "advanced" to follow stricter coding rules (such as declaring class types and so on).

Also, it would be *very* interesting to get information on the actual state of development on zend compiler, as far as it is out, I´d use and if non-free buy it (many others too - even one of our business guys asked if that *compiler stuff* is working) . As far as there´s an early beta I´d like to test it. I´m on the list for a while now and I know what you (Andi) and a few others think of different things like implementing more OO stuff etc. - but how should others know?

Actually most of the discussion has been on php-dev, but there hasn't been a lot of it because I'm reluctant at this stage to make major changes in PHP 4.0.x. There isn't any "internal" development on the Zend Engine going on in Zend Tech.

I´d like to see the development process of zend tech a bit more transparent without the need to manually browse the code... (and even then I do not know what´s planned to be realized...) Maybe I´m missing some important resource of information, then please excuse me.

Andi --- Andi Gutmans <andi@zend.com> http://www.zend.com/