Re: Calling symbol table patch

At together all of the "Oh, come on"'s we had about adding unnecessary code in that area of execute() and you'll get a serious slow down. Not only does this patch get into that category, it's also IMO bad coding to rely on such a feature. Andi At 03:34 PM 11/20/00 -0600, Andrei Zmievski wrote:

On Mon, 20 Nov 2000, Zeev Suraski wrote: Well, a stack push is a considerable slowdown. How much it slows things down exactly obviously depends on your script... Oh, come on. ZEND_API inline void zend_ptr_stack_push(zend_ptr_stack *stack, void *ptr) {

    if (stack->top >= stack->max) {     /* we need to allocate more memory */
        stack->elements = (void **) erealloc(stack->elements, (sizeof(void *) * (stack->max *= 2 )));
        stack->top_element = stack->elements+stack->top;
    }
    stack->top++;
    *(stack->top_element++) = ptr;

} Most of the time, stack->top is less than stack->max (because max = 64 on initialization), so all you are executing is the last two statements. I don't think your argument is very strong as far as performance is concerned. I think that the Right Way to do it would actually be a function that returns the current symbol table. Such a function can be implemented without slowing down or modifying anything in the engine, and then you could write: $tpl->batch_assign('foo', 'bar', 'color1', get_active_symtable()) It's a bit more to type, no doubt, but I think it's more correct that way... Perhaps one day we'll have macros in PHP :) What I don't like about the function is that it appears to be hacky - it defeats a basic scope protection rule in structured/OO programming... Yes, it does, but the only way around it is what you described up above and it doesn't really look that appealing. If it was C/C++, I could write a macro or something else, but with PHP, we don't have that. So, I'm not sure what the solution is. -Andrei What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not the writing, it's deciding what to write.

            -- Neal Stephenson

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