Re: Re: [mail] Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: Attributes support proposal

On Wednesday 27 April 2005 2:19 pm, Zeev Suraski wrote: > At 16:58 27/04/2005, Duncan McIntyre wrote: > >I remember similar arguments being made about most of the new OO features > >in PHP5. > > > >Out of interest, how is this more bloated than storing doc comments in > > memory? > > It's feature bloat, not memory consumption bloat. Adding obscure operators > is the worst thing to do, since it reduces readability and complicates the > language. Comments can be ignored, removed, be completely 'broken', etc. - > you can use them if you understand them and they're useful to you, but > you'll never get a piece of code which you wouldn't understand because of > the comment. Not so with features such as attributes. > Moving this sort of metadata away from the element it belongs to and declaring it in another method or property doesn't do much to help understanding either. Interfaces or not. > >If you are worried about removing bloat, I suggest removing doc comments > >from the engine. You are already storing the filename and linenumber where > >elements are defined, retrieving associated doc comments could happen in > >userland and a lot of memory would be saved. > > Again, I care less about memory consumption (which is quite small in both > cases), and more about readability and intuitiveness. > Hmm. As I mentioned to Christian in a private email, I have a system which is 350K LOC. Now not all of that gets loaded at one time of course (thank God for __autoload()!), but there are times when a significant proportion of it is loaded. And then it munches memory. Yes, I can strip the comments from production code. But that defeats the object of the getDocComments() reflection code. And screws me for my fallback attributes methodology :-( ... ... ... > I'm not too thrilled about this deal. I don't think I'd be in favour of > accepting this attributes patch regardless of just about anything > else. Not sure how others feel about it, but at least in my opinion, this > feature is a clear 'no no' for PHP. > > Zeev And there was I thinking you'd jump at it :-) D.