On 5 September 2024 16:53:32 BST, Mike Schinkel <m...@newclarity.net> wrote:
>
>Not convinced? At least one other person has my same view of the dark despair
>of block-scoping:
>
>https://forum.golangbridge.org/t/warning-for-accidental-variable-shadowing-with-block-scope/4715
>
>Of all the Go code I have written, I'd say accidental variable shadowing is in
>the top-three (3) reasons for bugs in my code, if not the main reason. And if
>it were not for BC breaks, I would lobby hard for Go to remove it. I know that
>some on the Go team lament that they ever included it.
Block-scoping doesn't have to allow shadowing of names, and it certainly
doesn't have to be achieved by that incredibly hard to spot syntax. In most
languages I've seen, it's indicated by either a keyword such as "let", "var",
or "my"; or by indicating the type of the variable you're declaring.
It's something I'd really like to see in PHP. For one thing, it would make me
much more likely to accept the repeated requests for closures which capture
parent scope by default, because it would give a clear opt-out to replace the
current clear opt-in of the use() clause.
I've never found myself wishing for local constants, but never really used a
language with them, so maybe I'd find them valuable if they were added.
For completeness, I'll mention that *typed* local variables are another related
concept, which has also come up in the past.
The big challenge in all of them is that these are big fundamental language
changes, which require an expert knowledge of how the language works under the
hood to get much beyond "that would be nice to have". Let's not get too deep
into discussing the colour of the bikeshed before we've worked out if there's
space to build one.
Regards,
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]
