On Nov 30, 2005, at 1:50 PM, Andrei Zmievski wrote:
Can you explain your reasoning behind "essential for using PHP as a
solid templating language" and "nothing is a good substitute for
the real deal"?
- Andrei
OK, to take an example from Smarty, you could do a value cycle (for
multi-row-color tables, etc.) with some extra parameters like so:
{cycle name="myCycle" values="#eeeeee;#d0d0d0" print=false
reset=true delimiter=";"}
(I'm not a Smarty expert, so I apologize if I didn't get that quite
right.)
Now, if I wanted to express that with a PHP function currently, it
might look like this:
cycle("myCycle", "#eeeeee;#d0d0d0", false, true, ";");
My question is, what if you have no idea how the cycle function
works, or you haven't used it in a while and temporarily forgot? Your
two options are look at the source code (if possible) or look at the
documentation (if it's any good). Whereas with named arguments, it's
self-explanatory.
cycle(name: "myCycle", values: "#eeeeee;#d0d0d0", print: false,
reset: true, delimiter: ";");
(FYI: I just picked a colon for the heck of it...whatever operator is
used isn't important to me.)
Much, much clearer and obvious. Perhaps not such a big deal in
"regular" PHP code blocks, but in an HTML/PHP mixed template type of
scenario, the named arguments are so much nicer. Plus, if they're
implemented in an order-agnostic fashion, you could reorder those
arguments any way you like -- but I don't necessarily think that's
its biggest selling point.
Sure, you could use an array for this, like so:
cycle(array("name" => "myCycle", "values" => "#eeeeee;#d0d0d0",
"print" => false, "reset" => true", "delimiter" => ";"));
But not only is that a lot more verbose and messy, but it provides no
language features in the function/method definition itself, so you
just have to hope the big array that comes in has the right stuff in
it. Not ideal.
Anyway, I hope that helps, and if you have any other thoughts or
questions, please shoot away.
Regards,
Jared
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