Announcing a specification for PHP

Post by chriswarbo » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 8:42 AM UTC

donatj wrote: post #168

maaaats wrote: post #23

After recently having to work with modern PHP, I have to say a lot of the criticism of the language is unfounded. It's changed a lot since I first used it. But the stdlib is still hard to manage. Different naming conventions, different order on the parameters for functions that do almost the same thing, and every function is global. Couldn't they keep all that for backwards compatibility, but create more sane wrapper…

Despite peoples grumblings about parameter order the only real reasonless difference is string functions are haystack / needle, whereas array functions are needle / haystack. Once you know that its not that difficult. Some other minor inconsistencies like array_map vs. array_filter are simply due to the fact that optional parameters have to be at the end of function calls. On array_filter the callback is optional, wh…

    $asBools = partial_apply('array_map', 'boolval');

    $asBools(['hello', '', 'world']) === [true, false, true]
    $asBools([-2, -1, 0, 1, 2]) === [true, true, false, true, true]

    $inverseFilter = partial_apply(flip('filter'), 'boolNot');

    $inverseFilter([-2, -1, 0, 1, 2]) === [2 => 0]
    array_keys($inverseFilter(['foo' => true, 'bar' => false])) === ['bar']

    $allTrue = partial_apply(flip(partial_apply(flip('array_reduce'), 'boolAnd')), true);

    $allTrue(['hello', 'world']) === true
    $allTrue([true, true, 0, true]) === false

Post by Dewie » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 8:46 AM UTC

Pacabel wrote: post #151

Dewie wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I said "presumably", and only referring to posting on HN, specifically (i.e. could have had previous accounts). This is very subjective, but I find people who (again, presumably) haven't been involved in a community who all of a sudden start right off the mark by posting in that community with a phrases like "HN hipsters", to be rude.

I don't think it was an attempt to be rude. "Hipster" is a term commonly used to describe those who advocate so-called "Web 2.0" technologies like Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, HTML5, NoSQL, and so on. These people openly admit that they dislike the previous generation of web development technologies built around languages/platforms like Perl, PHP, and Java. There are many of those people here, so it makes sense to refe…

Post by chriswarbo » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 9:05 AM UTC

jfoutz wrote: post #136

cdmckay wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought something along the lines of keeping the existing global namespace mess but also add in namespaced, consistent aliases like you've suggested, i.e. myStr.replace() As the new ones get more use, slowly deprecate and remove the original global namespaced functions, in the same way they phased out register_globals

or just distribute an upgrader with the next release. I'm sure it's more complicated than just find and replace, but the interpreter has a perfectly good parser right there. eval is impossible (or very hard), but it's pretty legit to error out in that case.

    $my_anon = function() {};

    function my_named() {}

    // Valid
    array_map($my_anon, []);

    // Invalid
    array_map(my_named, []);

    // Valid
    array_map('my_named', []);

    function smart_replace() {
      $args = func_get_args();
      $func = array_shift($args)? 'str' : 'preg';
      return call_user_func_array("{$func}_replace", $args);
    }

    $foo = "hello";

    $object1->$foo = $object2->$foo;  // Sets $object1's "hello" property to $object2's

    $object3->$foo();  // Calls $object3's "hello" method

    $bar = "foo";
    echo $$bar;  // Outputs hello

    array_map('str_' . $_GET['string_function'], $my_array);

Post by chriswarbo » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 9:21 AM UTC

cdmckay wrote: post #46

birkbork wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to order your program in a specific way, you introduce the appropriate level of abstraction. Same as with any other language. EDIT: i totally agree that the standard functions are a complete mess in PHP. But they have to stay around for backwards compatibility. Have a look at the SPL classes: http://php.net/manual/en/book.spl-types.php

This simply isn't possible in a way that would be convenient. For example, how would I make a string abstraction? Create a class? Ok, so we have: $str = new String("foo") $str->replace(...) over $str = "foo" str_replace($str, ...) This is fine, if we ignore the fact it's much slower. Where it really gets annoying is PHP's lack of operator overloading. That means to concatenate I'd need to do $str->concat($str2)->conc…

    String::implode($str1, $str2, new String(" "), $str3);
    String::sprintf("%s%s %s", $str1, $str2, $str3);

    array_reduce([$str1, $str2, " ", $str3], '.', "");

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Thu, Jul 31, 2014, 9:51 AM UTC

k3liutZu wrote: post #183

> PHP is definitely the lingua-franca of the internet. I think they misspelled Javascript.