> On May 6, 2020, at 4:14 PM, Rowan Tommins <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi Mike,
>
> On 06/05/2020 20:48, Mike Schinkel wrote:
>> Consider simply what we might call "Parameter Blocks." Since PHP always
>> expects a parentheses to follow the function or method name it should be
>> possible to opt-in replace it with a brace-enclosed block of parameters
>> instead since it would be unambiguous and this no conflict, and no need for
>> new keywords.
>>
>> The following illustrates how it my be used by repurposing an example from
>> the RFC:
>> ...
>
>
> I'm not really clear what this example is showing. It seems to be the same as
> the one in Nikita's RFC, but with the punctuation changed slightly from
> "(public $foo, public $bar)" to "{public $foo; public $bar;}"
That is exactly the case.
> I'm not sure how this changes anything, or how it relates to named
> parameters. Could you expand on the problems you see this solving?
Let's look at it like this, with line numbers that would be reported in the
case of syntax error:
1: function foo(public $foo, public $bar) {}
vs.
1: function foo {
2: public $foo;
3: public $bar;
4: } {}
--------------
Now, consider the following two examples. On which line would PHP report the
error?
function foo() (
public $foo,
public $ bar
) {}
vs.
function foo {
public $foo;
public $ bar;
} {}
With two parameters, no attributes and no PHP doc the error is pretty easy to
spot.
-----------------
Now consider a constructor w/20 properties/parameters, 5 attributes across
those properties, and a total of 100 lines of PHP Doc interspersed and it
becomes a lot more difficult to deal with if it is one virtual line — as PHP
sees it — than spread across 125 lines.
Much harder to diagnose a syntax error.
-----------------
It is for the same reason I avoid code that instantiates a single array literal
that spans hundreds of line of code and instead create methods to append small
array literals to the array. If you have one really long virtual line it makes
it much harder to identify where syntax errors occurred.
Having one long virtual line also limits what features can be added in future
versions of PHP.
If you need help visualizing it I mocked up an example from actual function
that is in product that was written by someone else before I joined the
client's current team:
https://gist.github.com/mikeschinkel/faaee3fc8ccc2371c7200f3d634289c4
<https://gist.github.com/mikeschinkel/faaee3fc8ccc2371c7200f3d634289c4>
-Mike
