> Using obscure single character operators is simply something that we don't
> do in PHP, it's totally inconsistent with the language.
You know I hate magic more than most. I have lobbied against it forever.
However, sometimes you need to conform with the underlying 3rd-party
mechanism you are connecting to.
Regular expressions are butt-ugly and full of magic. I'd love to
deprecate regular expressions and tell everyone to use a better mechanism
for string matching and manipulation. The LDAP reverse-polish query
format is also butt-ugly and non-intuitive, but people who have been doing
LDAP for years are quite fluent in it.
At the function level, strlen(), strchr(), strcmp(), strtok(), etc... are
all inconsistent with the PHP function naming standard. They should
logically be str_len(), str_chr(), str_tok()... or perhaps
string_length()... We don't do this because it would drive people very
familiar with the underlying API we copied crazy.
Having no efficient way to use _() would drive people very familiar with
gettext crazy because everywhere else they have used gettext they could
use this syntax. There are even gettext pre-processors that are keyed on
_("...") and go in and do static replacements of this text.
This doesn't mean I agree with the magic _() function, but until we have
some sort of efficient run-time function aliasing mechanism like they do
in Python, removing _() and telling people to create a user-space function
that calls gettext() is not going to make the gettext using people very
happy with us.
The way this was solved in Python is that they have a gettext.install
method which creates the _() function in the builtin namespace. The
function is only present once this install method is called on the gettext
object. See http://www.python.org/doc/2.1/lib/node187.html
Python has a second gettext API which is not as powerful and thus not used
as often and the typical usage of that is:
import gettext
_ = gettext.gettext
print _('blah blah')
ie. they use user-space function aliasing to create the _() function.
The thing to realize here is that _() is everywhere. Everything you read
about gettext will refer to _(), so people who want to use the PHP gettext
extension are going to want to use _(). There is no way around that. How
many hoops we force people to jump through to get there is the only real
question. We can't go back in time and change this convention. It's
there and we need to deal with it.
Now, ff this worked in PHP it would be an option:
define("_","gettext");
_("blah");
Or if there was a way to call a function like gettext_init() or maybe just
make it part of textdomain() or bindtextdomain() and have it dynamically
add the _ alias it would also be a good option. This doesn't seem
impossible actually.
I don't like the idea of forcing people to do:
function _($str) { return gettext($str); }
Since this is a function that will be called for every single string that
is output from an application, it is a function that will be called dozens
of times on every request. Adding the overhead of a user-space wrapper
call is irritating.
-Rasmus
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