Re: Another tiny syntax patch

On Jul 26, 2009, at 5:17 AM, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

We have talked about this before, and the conclusion was that if we are going to have an invalid PI, we might as well make it <?= since it is just as invalid as <?php= and just as easy to parse. Now you save 8 chars.

I prefer strong namespacing of all my tags. "<?" and "<?=" are highly generic and could be usurped by any other (admittedly finctional so far) processing system run on the file. As I said, it was just for the heck of it :). I know no one's likely to find it interesting. I did toy with the idea of something that was actually compliant, but: <?php. - is not visually distinctive <?php- - same <?php.e - saves very little typing and is ugly <?phpe - mucks with the entire idea of being namespaced <?php e - visually confusing and saves little typing And so forth.

Gwynne Raskind wrote:

For the sake of the heck of it, I'm gonna offer up this tiny patch I'm using in one of my projects. I don't really care if it gets included in anything or not, just thought it might interest someone. Effect: Adds a "<?php=" syntax which behaves identically to "<?=", but works without the use of short_tags. Caveat: The formation "<?php=" is not valid XML. Specifically, section 2.6 of [1] defines a PITarget as a Name, which in turn is made up of NameChars (section 2.3), which do not include the "=" character. Advantage: Saves five characters of typing. "<?php= $myvar ?>" versus "<?php echo $myvar; ?>". Just thought I'd throw it out there. Index: Zend/zend_language_scanner.l ===================================================================

--- Zend/zend_language_scanner.l    (revision 286353)
+++ Zend/zend_language_scanner.l    (working copy)

@@ -1537,6 +1588,15 @@ } +<INITIAL>"<?php=" {

+    zendlval->value.str.val = yytext; /* no copying - intentional */
+    zendlval->value.str.len = yyleng;
+    zendlval->type = IS_STRING;
+    BEGIN(ST_IN_SCRIPTING);
+    return T_OPEN_TAG_WITH_ECHO;

+} + + <INITIAL>"<?php"([ \t]|{NEWLINE}) {

    zendlval->value.str.val = yytext; /* no copying - intentional */
    zendlval->value.str.len = yyleng;

[1] Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 Fifth Edition, http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-xml-20081126/

-- Gwynne