Wow, noisy... I've been in the situation where I use php for templating and the short syntax is much nicer on the eyes. The ability to "flick the switch" for short tags would be nice.
However, like Steph, I've also been bitten by having a simple xml declaration in a file with short tags on that completely breaks things. Parse errors are NOT a good thing. This is why I'd personally prefer short tags just go poof - having to check all your code so any appearance of <? is echo'd gets really annoying. I'd argue that a <?php= shortcut or something similar would help "split the difference" between the ugliness of the long version and the need to not break php every time an xml declaration pops up in a file. Even gettext has a nice _() function shortcut which is less typing than echo $blah; in every php tag set, and then you wouldn't be fighting with the potential breakage. The argument that if some new syntax only goes into 5.3, people can't use it doesn't really hold water here because you wouldn't be able to rely on flipping the short_tags switch before 5.3 either. I can see both sides of the story, and really don't have a preference - I'm curious as to the opinions of someone OTHER than Marcus, Stas, Pierre and Jani ;) Thanks, Elizabeth M Smith -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
