Re: Upgrading php

Todd Ruth wrote:

I'd been ignoring the "curly braces" thread, but then I grepped my code and ... sure enough, I have curly braces that are used to index into strings. I don't care about this philosophically, but it makes me wonder about upgrade tools. I know I shouldn't ask this without volunteering to do it myself, but when a version of php comes out that makes such a change, is there any chance of having a tool that updates the code available at the same time? It seems to me that nothing understands php user code better than the core php code, so perhaps a tool could be written that uses the guts of php as a base. I suppose there are some IDEs that could do the job as well. Sadly, I still use vi, but I bet if something were written for emacs or eclipse, most people (even me) could learn to use it. I'm dreading going to php5. I hear that to avoid warnings/notices I'll need to convert a bunch of "var"s to "public"s. I'll need to wrap my "get_class"s with "strtolower"s. etc. It would be so wonderful to throw all my code at a tool that would change everything that can be easily changed and give me a list of spots I need to look at manually. A lot of the changes don't take an overwhelming amount of time to do myself, but when you think about the thousands of users all doing the same conversions, it just makes sense for there to be a tool. It might also have the side benefit of reducing long threads about breaking old code. Perhaps this already exists and I've missed it. Perhaps it will never exist because it isn't enough fun to write. Just an idea...

This is what the E_STRICT messages are for. If you turn them on (in PHP 5) you will get very specific messages about language-level issues in your code. -Rasmus