Re: [RFC Proposal] var keyword deprecation/removal

wrote in message news:56CF439F.2040506@fleshgrinder.com...

On 2/25/2016 10:26 AM, Tony Marston wrote:

Science shows that it is harmful, let's clean it up!

Your "proof" is not scientific, it is just personal opinion. There is no evidence that use of the "var" keyword is harmful in any way.

I think the diverged from talking about the "var" keyword in particular towards duplication in general a long time ago. However, I still think that DRY is empirically proven.

Where is your proof? You say "not used by a major part of the community" which means that it is still being used by a minor part, but exactly how "minor"? I don't see why I should be forced to make a totally unnecessary change to vast numbers of my scripts just to fall in line with your personal opinions.

It is true that I did not provide this proof because Colin O'Dell did claim this fact in the very initial message of this thread and I believe him.

So just because someone else states an opinion you are prepared to convert this to a "fact"?

There is no reason to remove it from ANY version of PHP. It does no harm, it would take effort to take it out and amend the documentation, but for what benefit?

I stick to the main reason I gave, DRY. Duplication needs to be managed and removing it removes the maintenance burden.

What maintenance burden? How much time is taken up by the language developers in maintaining the code that deals with the "var" keyword? How many bugs have been reported on this word since PHP was released?

Change for change's sake is never a good idea. I have been developing in several languages for 40 years, and I can tell you point blank that while programmers expect new features to be added they do NOT expect old features to disappear. Once a piece of code has been written and has proved to work as designed it is expected to work with all future versions. The only exception to this is to plug holes in security. This is called "forwards compatibility", and was a major selling point of all my previous languages. If developers fear that they will have to rewrite huge swathes of code each time a new version is released they will quickly give up and move to a "professional" language which offers long term stability.

I did not say that we should change for change's sake. I only stated that trying hard to prevent change by all means is wrong.

You are contradicting yourself. On the one hand you are saying that change for change's sake is wrong, and on the other hand you are saying that we should not block change for any reason.

Again, this diverged away from the "var" keyword alone a long time ago and was more a general statement. TL;DR Thanks for yet another aggressive/provocative email, I stick to my +1. However, you all have valid points to keep it.

-- Tony Marston