Re: PHP 5.4 - Meta attribute (aka. Annotations) support discussion

Mostly it is that a new syntax will confuse people and add complexity that PHP doesn't need. The same people don't believe that annotations bring value worthy of adding a new syntax. Short array notation and similar are noted as precedence. That is a bulk of the arguments, but if I have forgotten any please state them. -Alec On 11/15/2010 7:55 PM, Will Fitch wrote:

Wow. I should actually look at the RFCs more frequently. I have to say, assuming the patch is valid for PHP 5.3 (which I have no doubt it is), I don't see why this can't be taken more seriously. I know the discussion was brought up a few weeks ago, but what are the objections to injecting this functionality into the next major post-5.4 release? On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 6:47 PM, Alec<alecgorge@gmail.com> wrote:

The patch is already written and a RFC created by Guilherme: http://wiki.php.net/rfc/annotations . I personally think annotations could make a *great* addition to PHP. I agree with Will that annotations are especially useful for SOAP and XML-RPC. I personally think annotations are useful for APIs in general. Instead of creating a method to respond to a XML-RPC call, then binding it to a specific XML-RPC call with a line in the initialization you could just do this: @xmlrpc({

        name : "server.getValue",
        params : {
                param1 : {
                        type : "number",
                        docs : "This is documentation for param1"
                }
        }

}); public getValForXMLRPC ($param) { ... I just used JSON for the syntax of annotation. I did this for two reasons: 1. most PHP developers can write some Javascript, and 2. since this is supposed to avoid syntax discussions, I used a syntax no one uses for annotations, but everyone understands. The possibilities are endless with Annotations and as long as they are pretty speedy I think they would be picked up quite quickly and we would get some great examples from the community. My 2 cents. -Alec On 11/15/2010 6:54 PM, Will Fitch wrote:

I have certainly wanted them many times - especially when using SOAP. Having WSDL auto-generation without compromising developer documentation and attempting to have user-land code parse phpdoc for this purpose seem{ed,s} counterintuitive. That said, introducing annotations is a HUGE undertaking and would require a ton of work with potentially little return. I do think it would be worth looking into in a future major release, but there are quite a few other things that would be more beneficial to the community for immediate discussions. Did anyone write and RFC on this? guilhermeblanco has a good start. On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 5:44 PM, Pierre Joye<pierre.php@gmail.com> wrote: On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 12:39 AM, Zeev Suraski<zeev@zend.com> wrote:

Suggesting phpdoc is used for the purposes mentioned does not mean we

don't understand what we're talking about. I feel like you never used annotations in other languages, did you? Cheers, -- Pierre @pierrejoye | http://blog.thepimp.net | http://www.libgd.org -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php

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