On Feb 3, 2005, at 5:51 PM, Terje Slettebų wrote:
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.
Thanks. I've heard good things about Andi, Stig and Derick's book as well.
On Feb 3, 2005, at 1:58 PM, Terje Slettebų 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.
The real problem is that there's a constant influx of (usually) well-meaning people like yourself who come to the lists to propose ideas which have been discussed in depth numerous times before and which have been discarded (for better or worse, my personal opinion is for better in this case). 'Prone to misuse' and 'tends to result in unmaintainable code' are (in my exposure) two pretty common reasons that people dislike operator overloading.
At any rate, it's been discussed before and shelved, long before you came on the scene. Even though the topic is new for you in this venue, it's old for many other people, and it gets annoying to rehash the same topics every couple months when someone new joins the list. The discussions are all in the archives though, if you want to see the less-reactionary roots of the rejections.
George -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
