On Wednesday 27 April 2005 2:19 pm, Zeev Suraski wrote:
> At 16:58 27/04/2005, Duncan McIntyre wrote:
> >I remember similar arguments being made about most of the new OO features
> >in PHP5.
> >
> >Out of interest, how is this more bloated than storing doc comments in
> > memory?
>
> It's feature bloat, not memory consumption bloat.  Adding obscure operators
> is the worst thing to do, since it reduces readability and complicates the
> language.  Comments can be ignored, removed, be completely 'broken', etc. -
> you can use them if you understand them and they're useful to you, but
> you'll never get a piece of code which you wouldn't understand because of
> the comment.  Not so with features such as attributes.
>
Moving this sort of metadata away from the element it belongs to and declaring 
it in another method or property doesn't do much to help understanding 
either. Interfaces or not.

> >If you are worried about removing bloat, I suggest removing doc comments
> >from the engine. You are already storing the filename and linenumber where
> >elements are defined, retrieving associated doc comments could happen in
> >userland and a lot of memory would be saved.
>
> Again, I care less about memory consumption (which is quite small in both
> cases), and more about readability and intuitiveness.
>
Hmm. As I mentioned to Christian in a private email, I have a system which is 
350K LOC. Now not all of that gets loaded at one time of course (thank God 
for __autoload()!), but there are times when a significant proportion of it 
is loaded. And then it munches memory. Yes, I can strip the comments from 
production code. But that defeats the object of the getDocComments() 
reflection code. And screws me for my fallback attributes methodology :-(

...
...
...

> I'm not too thrilled about this deal.  I don't think I'd be in favour of
> accepting this attributes patch regardless of just about anything
> else.  Not sure how others feel about it, but at least in my opinion, this
> feature is a clear 'no no' for PHP.
>
> Zeev

And there was I thinking you'd jump at it :-)

D.

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