Re: Woah

At 16:37 08-09-01, Jim Jagielski wrote:

Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

Using obscure single character operators is simply something that we

don't

do in PHP, it's totally inconsistent with the language.

You know I hate magic more than most. I have lobbied against it forever. However, sometimes you need to conform with the underlying 3rd-party mechanism you are connecting to. If only for migration purposes. If someone knows the technology, then we don't want to force another "interface" to it, and if they don't, then providing a "different" interface to it to insulate them from the real magic does them, IMO, a disservice.

By that logic, PHP should be the supermarket of all other languages. Theory aside, if we look into the actual issue at hand: - I think it's a fair and safe assumption to make that there are a lot more PHP users who are not familiar with gettext at all than those who are. - I think it's a fair and safe assumption to make that out of those who do use gettext, a large number had no prior knowledge of other languages, and/or of gettext in other languages. - Out of the small remaining number of people who do use gettext *and* are used to working with it in other languages *and* used _() in that other language, none of them will be disappointed to find _() missing, because if they really miss it, they can create it in a second. Just like they do in C, by the way. On the other hand, when the rest of the PHP users come across scripts using _(), they're completely stumped. It doesn't look like a function, it's undocumented. Weighting the pros and cons is an easy call in my opinion. The *only* issue I see here is downwards compatibility (which can be solved, as it has been solved numerous times in the past, and especially as this function was never directly documented). Zeev