Re: [RFC] Shorter Attribute Syntax Change RFC 0.2

Hi Derick, > Out of Banjamin's suggestion[1], I've updated the Shorter Attribute > Syntax Change RFC to reflect that process: > > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/shorter_attribute_syntax_change > > Patches and comments welcome. 1. I feel like "Changes the lexing of **remaining** tokens" should also be included in the table following it - that's a major difference between #[(Yes) and each of the other proposals (No). The last time a substantial lexing change (that affected the following tokens, not just the tokens in question) happened was https://wiki.php.net/rfc/flexible_heredoc_nowdoc_syntaxes , but flexible heredoc is rare in practice and a project using it would almost always need to drop support for 7.2. I expect attributes to be used much, much more frequently than flexible heredoc, and to break in subtler ways. Projects such as php-parser would be affected by the change to lexing, and would either have to force users to specify the php major version or to always emulate 8.0's lexing if #[ was encountered in a T_COMMENT token. My earlier objections to #[ were https://externals.io/message/111218#111239 To add to that, the benefit of forwards compatibility is also a drawback in some ways for the next few years (or longer, if you include OSes that unofficially backport security patches) A developer running php7 could run php --syntax-check locally on a file containing attributes and assume it'd work in php 8 when deployed to a php 8 environment or when publishing a library to packagist. (e.g. #[DeprecationReason('This won't work because X')] has a single quote after won terminating a string literal, resulting in a parse error only affecting php 8) Better tooling would help to avoid that, but better tooling isn't universal. 2. This RFC mentions objections to @@ but not objections to other syntaxes. Summarizing/Linking the main arguments for/against all 4+ proposed syntaxes in an appendix of the RFC (with some reasonable length limit) would help in making an informed vote. There have been over 50 emails so far in https://externals.io/message/111300 and https://externals.io/message/111312 Thanks, - Tyson