note 36875 added to language.constants

before embarking on creating a language system I wanted to see if there was any speed advantage to defining language strings as constants vs. variables or array items. It is more logical to define language strings as constants but you have more flexibility using variables or arrays in your code (i.e. they can be accessed directly, concatenated, used in quotes, used in heredocs whereas constants can only be accessed directly or concatenated). Results of the test: declaring as $Variable is fastest declaring with define() is second fastest declaring as $Array['Item'] is slowest ======================================= the test was done using PHP 4.3.2, Apache 1.3.27, and the ab (apache bench) tool. 100 requests (1 concurrent) were sent to one php file that includes 15 php files each containing 100 unique declarations of a language string. Example of each declaration ("Variable" numbered 1 - 1500): <?php $GLOBALS['Variable1'] = "A whole lot of text for this variable as if it were a language string containing a whole lot of text"; ?> <?php define('Variable1' , "A whole lot of text for this variable as if it were a language string containing a whole lot of text"); ?> <?php $GLOBALS['CP_Lang']['Variable1'] = "A whole lot of text for this variable as if it were a language string containing a whole lot of text"; ?> Here are the exact averages of each ab run of 100 requests (averages based on 6 runs): variable (24.956 secs) constant (25.426 secs) array (28.141) (not huge differences but good to know that using variables won't take a huge performance hit) ---- Manual Page -- http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.constants.php Edit -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=edit+36875 Delete -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=delete+36875&report=yes Reject -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php?action=reject+36875&report=yes Search -- http://master.php.net/manage/user-notes.php