Rowan, even if they are not harder, there is no reason to keep this feature in docblocks. Even the argument "compatibility with current implementations" is flawed, because there are many different implementations (not only doctrine's) with different syntaxes, so any native option would break SOME implementations.
Docblocks are Documentation Blocks, which is meant for documentation only. Mixing documentation (@param) with runtime stuff (@manyToMany) is counter-intuitive and makes the ecosystem harder to learn. It's also weird that removing comment blocks break an app. 2015-11-25 14:47 GMT-02:00 Rowan Collins <rowan.coll...@gmail.com>: > Larry Garfield wrote on 25/11/2015 16:42: > >> However, doing so would make static checking more difficult; If >> annotations become a language-native feature, they should be a first-class >> citizen to make it easier for IDEs to handle. >> > > Could you explain why docblocks are harder to parse than text outside > docblocks? As far as I know, IDEs *already* parse docblocks, e.g. using > @param and @return for type analysis, so I don't really see why > generalising that would be a big problem. > > > -- > PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > >