Re: Woah

At 05:40 08-09-01, Chuck Hagenbuch wrote:

It's the kind of thing that gets used a lot in HTML, where otherwise there wouldn't be a function call at _all_ - just static text. Replacing gettext() with _() in this case actually does improve readability, in my opinion.

That's exactly what I said - there are several other functions/operators/labels which are used a lot and repeatedly, and we never made any exceptions as far as clarity goes.

It's documented, for what it's worth: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.gettext.php

That's unfortunate. IMHO, it should be phased out. Exceptions in php extensions have been made before where the extension mirrors the c library exactly, in order to not confuse people familiar with the library. This is another one of those cases - people familiar with gettext will be very confused if _() doesn't work the way they expect it to.

You're talking about exceptions in the naming convention? Well, the more accurate way to describe it is that originally, modules tried to copy the low-level API function names 1::1. Only at a later stage we started to strive towards a standard naming convention. Today, when adding new functionality, the low level API function names play no role, and the functions are named using the PHP naming convention. We explicitly decided that in the lengthy discussion about function naming convention that took place half a year ago or so. There was no clear decision as to what to do with the existing functions that are named after their low-level counterparts. At any rate, this is not the kind of exception I was talking about. _ includes 0.0 information about what it does, and unless you know exactly what it does, you're lost. It's not an issue of shortening words, or neglecting to put underscores between words. Not only do you not stand a chance understanding what you're reading without looking at documentation, but you also have absolutely no way of finding what this does if you actually look it up in a manual. Zeev Zeev