These are things in PHP which make me sad
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These are things in PHP which make me sad
1–10 of 217 posts
Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad
#2This is by far my (least?) favorite:
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The following things are considered to be empty:
- "" (an empty string)
- [...]
--> "0" (0 as a string) - [...]
- var $var; (a variable declared, but without a value in a class)
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Why the heck is "0" considered empty?
Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad
#3PHP's single greatest advantage is ubiquity - would love to see a CoffeeScript compiler for PHP that smooths out these issues.
Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad
#4This is by far my (least?) favorite: http://ca.php.net/empty ----- The following things are considered to be empty: - "" (an empty string) - [...] --> "0" (0 as a string) - [...] - var $var; (a variable declared, but without a value in a class) ----- Why the heck is "0" considered empty?
there's something wrong with the == and coercion in the if() statement in any language.
making the switch in if() be a boolean only pushes the problem off to the programmer, who will often choose the wrong function or expression to do the conversion
Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad
#5Before everyone goes all "why don't you switch to language X or platform Y or lisp variant Z" I just want to say good job on this.
These all seem to be sane critiques of PHP without being all doomsday world-ending inflamatory. Kudos.
Also, I think that this is another example of how hard it is to build up a large and widely-used language/framework without having lots of warts. Especially since PHP wasn't originally designed with the intention of powering everything from a simple blog/cms to facebook.
Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad
#6I've definitely run into #1 on the list. "Paamayim Nekudotayim" is a transliterated version of פעמיים נקודתיים, which means "double colon" in Hebrew. Zeev and Andi are Israeli, which kind of explains it, but the error message is still pretty useless.
Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad
#7php -r 'array("a","b")[0];' results in a parse error.
Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad
#8I've definitely run into #1 on the list. "Paamayim Nekudotayim" is a transliterated version of פעמיים נקודתיים, which means "double colon" in Hebrew. Zeev and Andi are Israeli, which kind of explains it, but the error message is still pretty useless.
Even in Hebrew, that is a useless error message...token names should mean what the token means, not what it looks like.
Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad
#9php -r 'array("a","b")[0];' results in a parse error.
Resolving arrays like that causes parse errors in a range of contexts. Anything that is a "function" cannot also pick one array key... leaving a lot of XML-parsing code that looks like
$xml = getXpathWhatever(); $xml = $xml[0];
Stranger yet, is that it works perfectly fine with resolving objects... for example
$xml = funct()->something->somethingelse()->a
Works fine...
Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad
#10This is by far my (least?) favorite: http://ca.php.net/empty ----- The following things are considered to be empty: - "" (an empty string) - [...] --> "0" (0 as a string) - [...] - var $var; (a variable declared, but without a value in a class) ----- Why the heck is "0" considered empty?
there's something wrong with the == and coercion in the if() statement in any language. making the switch in if() be a boolean only pushes the problem off to the programmer, who will often choose the wrong function or expression to do the conversion
> making the switch in if() be a boolean only
What exactly is the alternative?
If there's any problem here it's automatic coercion.