Patch to add "single-quote" heredocs

So I was using create_function() in various ways, and I said to myself, "this would look SO much better if I could use a heredoc that acted like a single-quoted string". Then I said to myself, "Wait. I know the PHP internals. Why don't I build a new syntax into the language?" The result was a small modification of the heredoc syntax that I call "nowdoc", and it looks like this: <?php $n = 1; $a = <<<ENDOFHERE I see $n. ENDOFHERE; $b = <<<~ENDOFNOW I see $n. ENDOFNOW; print "{$a}\n{$b}\n"; ?> And the output is: I see 1. I see $n. The b modifier is fully supported; a nowdoc acts exactly like a single-quoted string, save that you can embed single quotes into it. I wrote the patch for HEAD, backported it to PHP_5_2 (both fully up-to-date as of this message), and wrote a set of regression tests. The patch breaks none of the existing regression tests, and has no BC or SC breaks whatsoever, as far as I can tell. The patch can be found at <http://phpdoc.gwynne.dyndns.org/nowdocs.tar.gz>. I hope to see it included in PHP 6 and 5.3, maybe even 5.2.4 or 5.2.5 since existing scripts will continue to work without modification. <<<~ was a parse error before, so anyone who used it was doing something wrong anyway. Side note: I implemented nowdocs in the parser by sharing the heredoc code and passing $ and {$ through unmodified instead of replaced. I don't understand the way the HEREDOC_CHARS regexps work well enough to write a simpler matching rule for the newdocs, but it's clear that the patch could be optimized if only I knew how, since the entire content can be parsed by a single call to zend_scan_[unicode|binary_]escape_string() rather than having to be parsed for replacements. I may look into this later, but for the moment I wanted to get what's working out there in the commmunity. -- Gwynne, Daughter of the Code "This whole world is an asylum for the incurable."