On 11/25/15 10:47 AM, Rowan Collins wrote:
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.
Not being an IDE author I cannot say for certain, so perhaps it's easier
than I imagine. However, speaking as a user I would want a robust level
of static syntax validation of my annotations. Having robust syntax
validation show up in *some* parts of my docblock but not others is
confusing for me as a user; I hypothesize that it would similarly be
more difficult to selectively treat bits and pieces of the docblock as
code but not others. (My current IDE, PHPStorm, parses a docblock to
validate that it matches the method signature but all it does is tell me
if the whole thing is valid or not, and if I'm using a "used" class
name. It's actually very unhelpful when dealing with complex Doctrine
annotations like Drupal uses.)
Too, it means that a given annotation directive may have spurious *
characters inside its string, if it's multi-line. Sure, that can be
filtered out (Doctrine already does), but that's one more complication
to have to consider.
For me, the "sometimes it's code and sometimes it's not, even though it
looks the same" argument is sufficient to reject docblocks as a location
for annotations.
--
--Larry Garfield
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