Better standards in PHP-coding

"The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose between". Subject: Uses of block markers in coding GNU recommends a standard with block-markers aligned under each other and a number of people - including myself - find it senseless and counter-progressive to keep up an older standard resting from old days and doing the programmer a disfavor. Too many programmers continue to use a style that originates back to the days where dumb terminals with one-line memory and line-editors was common. Those days it could take long time to submit a line to the mainframe. I have tried it myself and in worst-case situations it could take up to half a minute to submit a line. So naturally we put more things into one line. Statements like if (tempratureM1>=tempratureSTP) {cout << "Warning! Cooling needed"; log(tempratureM1, "Warning);}; all in one line. When editors became a little faster people started to write: if (tempratureM1>=tempratureSTP) { cout << "Warning! Cooling needed"; log(tempratureM1, "Warning); } which is nicer to look at but would take many seconds more as one more line has to be submitted. - - - Nowadays few people have any problems with waiting for a CR. But for mysterious reasons a rest from the old forced "standard" remains among people who use C(++) like languages. It is still standard to write if (some_expression) { statements; ... } What the "{" - the marking of the beginning of a block that should be indented - is doing in the end of the line nobody has yet been able to explain me. Why, then, are functions not written as function foo(parameter1, foo(parameter1, parameter2, ... parameterN) { statements ... } ? In other block-structured languages you of course align block-markers under each other, allowing for easy scan. if expression begin statement; ... ... end; I have yet to see anybody write if expression begin statement; ... ... end; - - - Does it matter? Oh, yes it does. A lot. As teacher I know from experience that programmers has a harder time tracking their own block with a number of "{"s dancing far out of sight in the right side of the screen. This is not a matter of experience. No experience can ever make it equally fast to control structures based on vertically aligned block-markers contra those where the marker can be found anywhere on a line. As an amusing result of the weird practice it has been necessary to recommend a standard where the { }-pair is always used, even though there is only one statement following an if: if ($myvarirable1*myvariable2 >= myvariable3*myvariable4+114) { oneStatement; } instead of simply if ($myvarirable1*myvariable2 >= myvariable3*myvariable4+114) oneStatement; Why the need for the extra "{ }"s? Of course because the the difference between if ($myvarirable1*myvariable2 >= myvariable3*myvariable4+114) oneStatement; (correct) and if ($myvarirable1*myvariable2 >= myvariable3*myvariable4+114) { oneStatement; (wrong) is easily overlooked because of the block marker put away to the right! But nobody overlooks the difference betweeen if ($myvarirable1*myvariable2 >= myvariable3*myvariable4+114) oneStatement; and if ($myvarirable1*myvariable2 >= myvariable3*myvariable4+114) { oneStatement; where the missing "}" shines in the eyes. - - - We can only hope that some major standard-setters for PHP should make a rational decision about what standard to choose and not just keep "what we are used to" for the disadvantage of future generations of programmers. http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards.htm http://cs.nmhu.edu/personal/curtis/cs1htmlfiles/essentialssec6.htm Best regards SFM U5com Co Ltd.