>From: "George Schlossnagle" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
By the way, I have your book ("Advanced PHP Programming"), which I found
very good. :) I've also recently got Andi Gutmans, Stig S. Bakken and Derick
Rethans book, "PHP 5 Power Programming", which, from what I've seen of it,
also looks very good, and I'm looking forward to reading it.
>On Feb 3, 2005, at 1:58 PM, Terje Slettebø wrote:
>> Hm, I'm surprised by this response from someone who's name I recognise
>> as an
>> active PHP contributor. The answer strikes me as either arrogant and/or
>> ignorant (note: I'm not saying you are that, but that's how the reply
>> comes
>> across, given what what operator overloading is about). As I've
>> pointed out
>> in other postings in this thread, operator overloading is about much
>> more
>> than "just" "syntactic sugar". In C++, for example, it enables
>> important
>> things such as function objects (being able to pass an object to a
>> function,
>> for example, and have it behave as a function, enabling functional
>> programming, as well). This is not possible (possibly without jumping
>> through major hoops) in PHP.
>That's because functions are not first-class objects in PHP. You can
>do this same thing in straight C without operator overloading. While
>I'm happy (for you) that you like operator overloading, the view that
>it is inherently evil and leads to obtuse, magical code is not
>relegated to us PHP luddites. These ideas have all been discussed in
>depth long before you appeared on the scene to decry our lack of
>interest in 'evolving' the language to your liking.
Yes, I know that operator overloading, as well as statically
typed/dynamically typed, type checking, etc. are hotly debated topics, and
that can be healthy, at least as long as there are reasonable arguments for
either side. What I decried wasn't this thing in particular, and I'm
relatively new to the PHP online community, but from the responses I got,
felt something of a complacency ("The language is good enough as it is. Who
needs advanced features. They may be misused. Etc."), and I guess I reacted
to that, because I find it rather different in the C++ mailing lists and
newsgroups, where there's often lively discussions about the evolution of
the language. So it was more a perceived lack of willingness to consider, or
reconsider, proposals, and give reasonable arguments in return. Arguments
where given, I replied to them, and then it typically went nowhere from
there. Anyway, I'd be interested in any evolution, and by all means, PHP 5
has come a long way. But it probably wouldn't have been like this, had there
not been "early adopters", and people pushing for things like better OO
support.
Let me also mentioned that I _have_ found cool things in PHP, especially
things making it easier for web-programming, such as things like variable
functions, where you may dispatch to a function based on a string, for
example a GET parameter. This can lead to rather elegant code. Likewise, the
OO support is quite good, now.
Regards,
Terje
--
PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List
To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
