On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 12:12 AM, Nikita Nefedov <inefe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Feb 2013 19:10:22 -0000, Rasmus Lerdorf <ras...@lerdorf.com> > wrote: > > On 02/19/2013 03:07 PM, Nikita Nefedov wrote: >> >> Are you grepping for all the functions or you are grepping just for some >>> specific function? If so, you are likely already know what visibility >>> this function has, so couldn't you grep for `public %functionName%` >>> instead of `function %functionName%`? >>> At the end, you can always use `grep >>> '(function|public|private|**protected) functionName' file`, and if it's >>> long to type, you can make sh script, or even alias. >>> >> >> public is the default visibility so it is often left off, so no, I can't >> grep for that. >> >> -Rasmus >> > > As Sara noted, we shouldn't let users define methods without modifiers at > all, so at least public/private/protected will have to be there. > > So omitting function is good because it saves keystrokes and you can still (ab)use the visibility modifiers for grepping, and that shouldn't be omitted anyway because having explicit visibility over saving a couple of keystrokes is a good thing as Sara noted™. Changing the language so the visibility modifiers are mandatory would cause a little bit more visible/explicit declarations(only a little bit, because it is really easy to remember what is the default visibility), and it would require to change/fix a large amount of code but automating that would be fairly trivial (one could even do it using grep :P). Making the function keyword optional would cause no BC issues, and it would make possible to write more javaish looking code, which would perceived as a good thing by some peple, and ofc it would save us typing out the function keyword (btw. my IDE autocompletes that so that would only spare me 3 keystrokes). On the other hand it would make parsing/grepping php code a little bit more difficult and can cause some issues later on (eg. if the function keyword is optional and we add features like accessors/etc. later on, they need to have more explicit declaration or will be more confusing to read). Personally I agree with Zeev and co that changing the language should be always done when the pros clearly outweights the cons and I think that this isn't the case here. -- Ferenc Kovács @Tyr43l - http://tyrael.hu
