On 24/11/2015 16:30, Pedro Cordeiro wrote:
I'd been reading some old RFCs recently, and I found two RFCs on the
subject of annotations, both by Guilherme Blanco. The first one, which
proposed a native syntax for annotations, is marked as 'declined', and I
couldn't find a discussion for it anywhere. The second one, which proposes
retrieving annotation from DocBlocks through reflection is 'inactive', with
no further explanation.
I'd really like to see native annotation support for PHP that doesn't live
in comments.
Is there a reason those RFCs were dropped, or was it just lack of interest?
I think one of the stumbling blocks in recent discussions of annotation
support is just how much support should be provided; off the top of my
head, this could be:
- a few extra functions in reflection classes to parse the items within
a docblock (docblocks are already handled in reflection separately from
normal comments)
- automatic instantiation of a set of standard Annotation objects with
the text content above
- automatic instantiation of classes based on the annotations provided
- built-in support for applying annotations to the objects they appear
on, perhaps in the form of full Aspect-Oriented Programming support
At first sight, these seem like details which could be tweaked later,
but they make a difference to what syntax to standardise: is the
annotation name just a string, or a valid class name? is the value of
the annotation just a string, or a parseable PHP expression? is it more
useful to use the de facto existing syntax in DocBlocks, or to add a new
keyword or operator? etc
The devil, as ever, is in the detail.
Regards,
--
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]
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