At 16:28 08-09-01, Rodent of Unusual Size wrote:
>This sort of argument keeps coming up, but Zeev is the lucky one
>who sets me off.. :-)
>
>People are very free to speak about what *others* expect. Unless
>you are one of them, or have concrete evidence, then such remarks
>are nothing more than speculation, and the electrons that conveyed
>them are already doing other things. :-) For instance: Zeev, did
>you come to PHP from C?
Yes
> Did/do you use gettext in other languages?
No
>If the answer to the latter, at least, is 'no' then I think the
>experience of people like Rasmus and Chuck -- who *do* use gettext
>a lot, and in other languages -- carries a helluva lot more weight
>than your speculation and that of other non-gettext-users.
I respectfully disagree. The issue here isn't about people who use
gettext. It's about those who don't. And to determine that _() breaks
readability of code, *other people's code* that you (a general you, not you
in person) will have to maintain, I don't have to be a gettext user. On
the contrary, the fact I (or Joey, for that matter) came across code with
_() which confused me completely, is exactly the reason why the statements
of those who know&use gettext carries less weight.
Fact - there are lots of obscure features in many different language.
Assumption - the people who added these features believed them to be useful
and not to be obscure, otherwise, they wouldn't have added them.
Moral - the obscurity of such a feature should be determined by the general
public, and *NOT* by the ones who use it.
>Inconveniencing your long-time users in the name of language purity
>is, IMHO, just plain stupid.
To keep us from spiraling down the drain, I'll leave that one unanswered :)
> > I'm not sure why you're failing
> > to see the fundamental difference between a function that is complex and
> > perhaps requires prior knowledge, and an entry that obscures the
> > *namespace* of PHP.
>
>And I personally am not sure why the 'get rid of "_"' faction is
>failing to see that doing so would be a language REGRESSION, not
>a step forward. Please tell me of some examples in other languages
>in which long-time warts with thousands of users have been removed
>in later versions in the name of 'language purity.' If you can name
>some, cool; I will be less ignorant, and might reconsider my
>position. Otherwise, d'you think PHP should be *that* kind of
>groundbreaker? :-)
I wouldn't say PHP is a ground breaker in that front, but it certainly
suffered from a huge legacy of badly named functions in comparison to other
languages. I thought we were trying to do something about it, slowly but
surely. If a small faction of gettext users can end up leaving the
mother-of-all-obscure names in the language, I really don't know why we bother.
>Look, I think there is no question that removing '_()' is going
>to BREAK some users. I do not see how anyone can consider that a
>Good Thing. I suggest that it be left in, and documented
>more clearly, and the documentation updated to say 'the use of
>gettext() is highly recommended and preferred over that of _()'.
Did you look at the deprecation method I suggested? Deprecating functions
is something that we did in the past, and it's a slow process that tries to
be as harmless as possible. It's not about starting up vi on gettext.c,
nuking that alias and committing.
The problem with this whole discussion is that people are mixing two issues:
(a) Is it an ok thing that _() is a PHP function
(b) What can we do about removing it
Note, that most of the people who argued on php-dev argued about (a), for
all sorts of different reasons. Sorry, I just don't buy that. I think
you're the only one who argued about the practicality of removing it (b).
If we agree that _() is wrong (a), then we can discuss what can be done
about what can be done to fix it (b). Perhaps we'll come to the conclusion
that nothing can be done, but considering we've already deprecated
functions in the past (yes, in the name of language namespace cleanliness!)
and we plan to do so in the future, I find this very unlikely.
Zeev
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