Hello Stanislav,
Friday, March 21, 2008, 8:11:04 PM, you wrote:
> Hi!
>> For me the largest issue is infact late enabling of short tags at run time.
>> The issue tracks down to the issue where peole might use code that enables
>> short open tags but forgets to disable that. Now why might I rely on short
> I think this case is very unlikely. The use case for this feature is
> template system, written in long-tags style, but using short-tags
> notation for PHP templates. To compare:
> My name is <?= $name ?> and I am <?= $age ?> years old.
> My name is <?php echo $name; ?> and I am <?php echo $age; ?> years old.
> I think there's little doubt people - especially non-programmer people
> like designers - would have much less trouble understanding and writing
> first notation than second notation. If you compare larger, more complex
> templates, the difference in readability is even bigger. And having code
> easy to work with is one of the reasons people do PHP.
But the non programmers don't understand <?=, $ and ?> either. And instea
of promoting <?= we should probably add <?echo which would be compatible
to XML.
> Now, in a template system, it is really hard to imagine that template
> system creator would be so sloppy as to intend to write code like:
> setShortTags();
> include $user_template;
> resetShortTags();
> and somehow "forget" to write the last function. That would require
> extreme absent-mindedness on developer's part and you definitely should
> steer clear of template systems written by such people. However, for
> real template systems I know - they are written by very smart people,
> and actually these people support this capability, as it allows them to
> use nice syntax in templates without requiring any system configuration
> (which may be unavailable or incompatible with other code).
>> open tags being disabled is another question of course. Years ago when we
> This is very important question, since the only known case of why it
> might be important is when you use XML as template by including it
> directly through PHP parser. I don't think I would be mistaken if I say
> this is extremely rare use case. Actually, I'm not sure there's even one
> of common applications - like known CMSes, frameworks, blog platforms,
> e-commerce platforms, etc. - that can not work with short tags. Can you
> name which ones can't?
> Again, I consider the concept of "accidentally enabling" sort tags very
> improbable, but even if it somehow happened - IMO it would not be a
> problem except in some very rare use cases.
>> last discussed whether we should discourage them the conclusion was that
>> not many people rely on them being off. Today many people have php code
> And if you look at the discussion, there were opinions - including
> Zeev's - that there's nothing wrong with shorts tags in general, only in
> some rare use cases.
That is more than 5 years ago though.
>> short syntactical sugar when all it does is saving keystrokes. With short
>> open tags the argument usually simply is that '<?=$bla?>' is shorther than
>> writing '<?php echo $bla:?>'. But then again the former is much harder to
>> spot in manual written code. And for generated code it doesn't matter at
> I have hard time figuring out a use case when you need to "spot" this in
> your code - and, indeed, have one in your code at all, unless it is a
> template. In a template, <?= is much better and with any decent editor,
> very easy to spot.
Nope, the shorter the sequence to look for the harder.
>> all. That said I am against short open tags. And given my first part. I do
>> not want to deal with code that does 'php_ini_set("short_open_tags", 0);'
>> after every single include or require statement.
> You do not need to deal with this code, and there's absolutely no reason
But I do not have to use something is no reason to add a function.
> And on top of that - if you are still concerned, you always could do
> php_admin_value which IIRC blocks setting values by user.
But I don't want to add more stuff to make sure my stuff works. I want it
infact easier with less configurations.
Best regards,
Marcus
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