Re: [RFC] Line markers in PHP

In my eyes this change isn't necessary and if it is, not with this syntax. First the syntax: PHP is not C, we do not have preprocessing instructions using hash notation. Such a syntax seems unfamiliar in PHP. Additionally # is already used for single line comments so there's actually is no backwards compatability: Old code that accidentally was of your proposed form would trigger a line marker, potentially causing much confusion when debugging. If we really do need such a feature it should follow PHP's declare syntax: declare(line=17, file='hi'); // or declare(line=5) { // ... } Now concerning your use cases: It is fairly easy to rewrite PHP errors. One of the examples you give are Smarty templates. Twig (another template engine), already does line number rewrites by inserting // line ... comments into the template and extracting that information using the tokenizer. (https://github.com/fabpot/Twig/blob/master/lib/Twig/Error.php#L147) It's not terribly complicated. And this is the most complex case, where line number distribution is not just off-by-n, but really requires line-hints in the source. For the PHPT tests a simple addition of the number of lines before the actual test will suffice. Even no tokenizer needed. (Sorry, forgot to send to list)