Re: Woah

Wez Furlong wrote: > > On 11/09/01, "Egon Schmid" <eschmid@php.net> wrote: > > The _() alias is no function. If someone build-in gettext, he or she > > should read the gettext documentation. The manual can be only a better > > function reference and if every alias would have a description just like > > the real functions, newbies will never find the functions to use. > > So why don't we have an alias index? Surely we can autmatically generate > such a list and just have the aliases link to the preferred functions? To automatically generate lists of functions and/or a separate alias list is no problem. The problem is the alphabetically sorting of lists with the current DSSSL stylesheets. I hope Hartmut or Jouni will have enough free time to play with it. > > Out of the curiosity, there have been a function (couldn't find it yet) > > which was named rtfm(). This function appears in a German book about PHP > > and it was implemented as a real function and was properly documented. > > If you are interested in the not so long history of the rtfm() function, > > search in the PHP-DEV mailing list archive. > > IIRC, it was Hartmut's baby but it got voted out. I didn't realize it > was publicized in a book :) No, it was Peter Petermann's baby. He was one of the technical reviewers of a German book about PHP. We have here in Stuttgart a verg big and great PHP user community and so we have been informed, that Peter made his best joke in his life and wrote the nonexistent rtfm() function into this book. Late evening, Hartmut made a skeleton of that function with his notebook and checked it some days later in and provided the proper documentation. The rest of this story is history. This was the first case in the history of PHP that a function was described before the code existed. (There may be a formating code in the date functions, that is documented but not coded.) -Egon