> On Jun 15, 2026, at 21:25, Hendrik Mennen <[email protected]> wrote: > <snip> > > If that friction is not worth solving, that is a legitimate position > and I would rather hear that than dress the proposal up to look > weightier than it is. Three honest paths from here, and I would find > it useful if respondents could say which they are closest to: > > 1. The friction is real and a small targeted addition is worth > shipping. (what the RFC proposes) > 2. The friction is real but the mechanism is wrong. (in which case: > what signal would you prefer? per-file declare, magic first line, > SAPI-only, ...) > 3. The friction is not real, or not worth a language change at all.
I am strongly in camp 3; I see zero value in this. Adding meaning to a specific extension is a BC break when no extensions have meaning prior. In addition, it makes it difficult to identify the file type from the code alone if you're not familiar with it. There really isn't any friction here, any decent editor or IDE will give you a default file header with the open tag (at least). At worst they'll auto-complete after at most 2 characters. It's also important to note that other languages have explicit template files like Jinja or ERB, PHP does not have this and is itself essentially both the template language and the full programming language. Yes it's a legacy way of doing things like ASP classic or ColdFusion, but that doesn't make it wrong or bad. - Davey
