RE: [PHP-DEV] Design by Contract

De : Pierre Joye [mailto:pierre.php@gmail.com] >> Yes, it makes phpdoc more tied to the engine but is it a problem ? > > And here I have to jump in and say: don't. > And remind about one of the exact purposes of annotations. Sorry, I am not sure I understand. If you're talking about the link between the engine and phpdoc comments, I agree. It is not a job for the PHP engine. It is a job for a script pre-processor, contained in an extension, and called BEFORE the file starts to be parsed by the engine, not after the AST is generated. It is very easy to pre-process PHP scripts and insert PHP code for DbC checks, while doing the same using an AST and generated opcodes looks much harder to me. As I told Alexander, in my opinion, phpdoc blocks already provide a lot of useful DbC information. My objective is to extend the syntax to support more complex directives, which are still legitimate phpdoc information. I see both concepts as closely related. One is generating documentation, one is generating runtime checks, but both use the same information. About annotations, I don't know much about it, as I was naively thinking that phpdoc '@' directives were annotations, but I understand I was probably wrong. The only concern I have about introducing a new annotation syntax is BC break. Cheers François