On 21 October 2012 21:38, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 7:19 AM, Roy Smith <r...@panix.com> wrote:
> > Of course, the same can happen in Python. I could do:
> >
> > foo = "default value"
> > if blah == 47:
> > fooo = "some other value"
> > print foo
> >
> > No syntax error, no NameError, just the wrong thing printing.
>
> Yeah, that's the worst kind of bug. No error, just wrong behaviour.
>
Au contraire, the *worst* kind is code that is wrong that - for now -
happens to work... and you have no clue why.
> This kind of issue is one of the "balancing downsides" of the freedom
> of not requiring variable declarations. For small scripts, it's not a
> problem, and Python and PHP both save you the hassle of explicitly
> telling the language that you really do know what you're doing, and
> that's a Good Thing. For large modules, debugging creeps up in
> significance, and variable declarations are less of a cost.
> JaCMaScript in "use strict" mode and a good linter can catch a lot of
> these sorts of bugs, though it has its own weirdnesses (why does a
> 'var' statement apply to the whole function regardless of where it
> is?). C-derived languages with proper block scope have a good chance
> of catching bugs of this nature at compile time, but at the cost of
> demanding code that's mainly there to satisfy the compiler ("isn't it
> OBVIOUS that I want this to be an integer? I'm assigning an integer to
> it!").
>
> > This does
> > not in any way detract from the fact that PHP is a horrible language.
> > Trust me, if you continue to use it, your dislike for it will only grow.
> > It is truly evil. Have you discovered "unexpected
> > T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM" yet?
>
> The double-double-dot-in-Hebrew token name isn't actually a bad error;
> the only problem is the token name itself. If it said "unexpected
> T_SCOPE" or something, it'd be easier to debug. Several of PHP's most
> annoying issues are solved in version 5.4 (array indexing a function
> call that returns an array now works), but there's still a huge
> fundamental that's unsolved: Unicode support. Python FTW there,
> especially now that PEP 393 means strings are as compact as possible.
>
> ChrisA
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