Re: Is there a technical reason <?= considered a "short tag"?

On Jun 5, 2009, at 12:53 AM, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

Hannes Magnusson wrote:

On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 07:47, Rasmus Lerdorf<rasmus@lerdorf.com> wrote:

Nobody is going to pass a PHP script through an XML parser, and PHP itself will never be well-formed, so that is a lost cause. We'd have to start tossing CDATA blocks and write code like: if( 2 &lt; 3 ) echo "2 is less than 3";

No you don't. & and < are perfectly legal in PIs

And that just isn't going to happen. The only valid argument against short_tags itself is that it clashes with named PI tags and <?= does not have that same problem.

<?= is not a valid target name either, so it has the same problem. 4] NameStartChar ::= ":" | [A-Z] | "_" | [a-z] | [#xC0-#xD6] | [#xD8-#xF6] | [#xF8-#x2FF] | [#x370-#x37D] | [#x37F-#x1FFF] | [#x200C-#x200D] | [#x2070-#x218F] | [#x2C00-#x2FEF] | [#x3001-#xD7FF] | [#xF900-#xFDCF] | [#xFDF0-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#xEFFFF]

The point still stands. If you are trying to parse PHP with an XML parser, you are doing it wrong. I have absolutely no problems annoying the one or two pedantic people who care about this for the benefit of thousands who don't.

The RFC was marked declined due to repeated discussions and lack of change, but declined without much fanfare or official yay or nay discussion aside from a mention in a recent related thread, IRC, and CVS. So it feels like decoupling <?= from short_open_tag is on the table. Rasmus or Stas, could you please propose exactly how this might happen? Like when, and if the fate of short_open_tag would be affected (which is never deprecate nor disable by default). And while few want to talk about short tags (again), it's worth noting that a discussion specific to decoupling really hasn't taken place except for silence and a few "yeah, that might be alright... sometime" Regards, Philip