Re: Proposal: Array syntax

At 02:07 AM 11/6/2003 +0100, Christian Schneider wrote:

George Schlossnagle wrote:

George (thinking [] is pretty but disliking alternative syntaxes)

Ok, let me recap my short visit on this mailing list: 1) Dangling commas in function calls were considered bloat

No, not bloat. I was worried that they might bite us at some point in the future if/when we want to add some features to function calls. I don't see this as a crucial feature.

2) Adding the local vars to debug_backtrace() was silently ignored

Because I think most people probably don't have much of an opinion on this. Personally, it could maybe be an optional parameter.

3) A prettier array syntax was discarded because it's an alternative

I don't think it has been discarded yet. I usually object to this kind of stuff but I do see that it improves the readability of code enormously (IMO). I think the answers on this list were split. How about you write a realistic sample script both ways and post it to the list. I think the examples people gave on this list were not realistic. Give me any language feature and I can show you how ugly it can be made :)

On the other hand Sara Golemon wrote: It's Perlish and ugly. It is *not* PHP syntax. while e.g. private, catch, throw, final were introduced which are Javaesque and ugly. They are *not* PHP spirit of a simple language. But I didn't complain.

These features are a necessity for PHP to continue to compete in the web application development market.

After all this I guess I have to maintain my own PHP branch and hope for PHP6 to address some of my issues. Or switch to another language at some point, because a language to me is a tool, not a religion.

I don't think your issues are that serious that they require you to switch to a different language. Andi