Re: Direction for the Function Renaming Effort

Zeev and Richard wrote: >'and' and '&&' are not the same thing, and 'or' and >'||' are also different... <OT a bit> I know - but 15 years of ARM assembler programming has taught me the beauty of minimalism. With sensible use of brackets, they are the same, the code is more readable (IMHO!), and a novice programmer has a chance of working out what's going on. </OT a bit> Again, just to reiterate, I don't want to break any code at all, I would like to see PHP able to run all (or maybe 99.9% of all) current scripts without problems. Also, I'm certainly not moaning at all. PHP is currently a fantastic tool - it hits the spot very well indeed, and I love using it. But, as we all know, it can be improved. Users may not be complaining loudly (or indeed at all) which is fair enough. Most of them have just discovered a new tool which does the job far better than anything else they've ever used before - hardly something to moan about! It would be nice in ten years time to be able to look back and be glad that in 2001 he had 'vision' to tidy things up. Carrying baggage only gets worse as time goes on - ask MS or Intel. Rather than tidying up around the edges, I urge everyone to consider a proper spring clean. Methods such as a php.ini switch, or a call to i_want_to_run_in_clean_mode_please() (or a more sophisticated and future proof version based switch) can enable the new cleaner world and whatever warning messages etc are required. The minimum I would like to see done is: Consistent sensible names for all functions. Aliases to the above for 'well known' function names (eg standard C stuff so that we can use strcmp as well as string_compare or whatever) Consistent argument order for all functions Then, while the drains are up, we might also consider: Taking a close look at the language for duplicate implementations of the same functionality (eg &&/and) and where appropriate, stripping out unnecessary duplication. Taking a close look at what certain functions do, and if they should do something different then 'make it so'. (My favourite bugbear in this category is empty() - because it returns true for a string containing '0' somehow I can never use the function. Maybe it's useful in a context I have never come across yet, but if not, it should be changed. I'm sure everyone has a list of things they think should work slightly differently) Other stuff which bugs other people! I know that there is never a good time to do this kind of stuff, but if we don't evolve we become extinct. Cheers -- Phil Driscoll Dial Solutions +44 (0)113 294 5112 http://www.dialsolutions.com http://www.dtonline.org