Re: Whitespace around Paamayim Nekudotayim (double colon)

Hey Matt. Am 15.02.21 um 06:14 schrieb Matthew Brown: > Hey all, > > Is there interest in prohibiting whitespace around double colons in the > next major PHP version? > > I was surprised to learn that PHP treats :: similar to ->, allowing double > colons like > > A:: > b(); > > Looking at the top 2,000 packages in Packagist I can't find any evidence of > people using a double colon with whitespace around, and my suspicion is > that the use of it is basically non-existent. > > I wonder if there's a benefit to removing a small potential footgun from > the language? I can't really see any benefit to _keeping_ it (unless it > turns out my analysis is wrong, and it's actually wildly popular). Additional whitespace means *any* whitespace. Not just line ends. And I've seen far too many codebases that use spaces around double colons (or arrows or a lot of other things) like this: A :: b(); Not allowing that on a language level just to avoid people shooting their own foot while we have enough userland tools to at least make people aware of such issues (like php_codesniffer, php-cs-fix or – perhaps even better – phpunit) feels a bit drastic to me. Cheers Andreas -- ,,, (o o) +---------------------------------------------------------ooO-(_)-Ooo-+ | Andreas Heigl | | mailto:andreas@heigl.org N 50°22'59.5" E 08°23'58" | | https://andreas.heigl.org | +---------------------------------------------------------------------+ | https://hei.gl/appointmentwithandreas | +---------------------------------------------------------------------+

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