Re: Woah

At 05:23 08-09-01, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

Having an underscore as a function name is pretty weird in any language.

Having an obscure meaning to characters is common in certain languages, but PHP isn't one of them. C isn't either, and frankly, I don't think that going with _() was a very good choice in there either.

But it is also extremely useful. I have reams and reams of PHP code that has _('blah blah blal') in it. When you internationalize a large site, typing gettext() thousands of times does get rather old very quickly.

That's fine and dandy, except gettext() is just one way to internationalize a site, and there are all sorts of other functionalities people use and reuse. We can get back to the idea of letting people define % as htmlspecialchars(), because that's very often used. Why not use $_C instead of $_COOKIE, in the new variables code? That'd save just as many keystrokes, and people use cookies all the time. Using obscure single character operators is simply something that we don't do in PHP, it's totally inconsistent with the language. Zeev