At 20:48 30/07/2004, Edin Kadribasic wrote:
On Friday, Jul 30, 2004, at 19:38 Europe/Copenhagen, Andi Gutmans wrote:
At 01:29 PM 7/30/2004 -0400, Ilia Alshanetsky wrote:On July 30, 2004 01:11 pm, Andi Gutmans wrote: > Secondly, I just don't understand what the sudden necessity for the goto > construct is when over the years we have barely ever had a PHP developer > asking for it.
That can be said for virtually any new functionality that was added to PHP.
Looking at the feature request lists, I only see one person asking for
exceptions to be added to PHP, and yet they were added. As PHP's userbase and
it's possible applications grow so do demands of the developers from the
language. Just because something was not needed for X years, it does not mean
there is no need for it now. The comments expressed by a large number of
responders to this thread indicate that "goto" are not a fancy of a slim
minority.
a) Most of the OOP functionality was requested by a huge amount of PHP developers I've talked to.
b) I don't think internals@ is a reflection of the PHP community. Most people here fall into the category of very advanced developers. Doesn't make sense to me to add a stinky construct which no one should really be using, just because there are 50 people out there (most of them on internals@) who would actually use it correctly.
Come on. I can't even believe we are arguing about this.
I really can't believe this "PHP is only for morons" attitude that comes from time to time here on internals.
It has nothing to do with morons. Or at least very little. It has to do with beginners who have no formal CS education nor prior experience. PHP, unlike most other languages, is extremely friendly to such people, and they account for a HUGE chunk of the PHP userbase. They can be bright, they can be dumb, but either way - they're not born with the knowledge that using GOTO is generally a bad practice, and we have no way of relaying it to them. There are other things people aren't born with (such as the idea that you should divide code blocks to functions, indent, etc.) - and the percentage of butt-ugly PHP code is indeed higher than what you can find in most other languages, simply because it's so friendly to beginners. Given the fact that this target audience is one of the most important ones for PHP, which drive its growth - we shouldn't add more obvious places for them to fall into.
I might have missed a mini-discussion on this list, but can someone recap why they don't want to use exceptions to get exactly the same functionality as GOTO? Do we at least agree that in PHP, the motto of being able to do everything in a lot of different ways is not something we strive for?
Zeev
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