wrote in message news:56cf439f.2040...@fleshgrinder.com...
On 2/25/2016 10:26 AM, Tony Marston wrote:
Science shows that it is harmful, let's clean it up!
Your "proof" is not scientific, it is just personal opinion. There is no
evidence that use of the "var" keyword is harmful in any way.
I think the diverged from talking about the "var" keyword in particular
towards duplication in general a long time ago. However, I still think
that DRY is empirically proven.
Where is your proof? You say "not used by a major part of the community"
which means that it is still being used by a minor part, but exactly how
"minor"? I don't see why I should be forced to make a totally
unnecessary change to vast numbers of my scripts just to fall in line
with your personal opinions.
It is true that I did not provide this proof because Colin O'Dell did
claim this fact in the very initial message of this thread and I believe
him.
So just because someone else states an opinion you are prepared to convert
this to a "fact"?
There is no reason to remove it from ANY version of PHP. It does no
harm, it would take effort to take it out and amend the documentation,
but for what benefit?
I stick to the main reason I gave, DRY. Duplication needs to be managed
and removing it removes the maintenance burden.
What maintenance burden? How much time is taken up by the language
developers in maintaining the code that deals with the "var" keyword? How
many bugs have been reported on this word since PHP was released?
Change for change's sake is never a good idea. I have been developing in
several languages for 40 years, and I can tell you point blank that
while programmers expect new features to be added they do NOT expect old
features to disappear. Once a piece of code has been written and has
proved to work as designed it is expected to work with all future
versions. The only exception to this is to plug holes in security. This
is called "forwards compatibility", and was a major selling point of all
my previous languages. If developers fear that they will have to rewrite
huge swathes of code each time a new version is released they will
quickly give up and move to a "professional" language which offers long
term stability.
I did not say that we should change for change's sake. I only stated
that trying hard to prevent change by all means is wrong.
You are contradicting yourself. On the one hand you are saying that change
for change's sake is wrong, and on the other hand you are saying that we
should not block change for any reason.
Again, this
diverged away from the "var" keyword alone a long time ago and was more
a general statement.
TL;DR Thanks for yet another aggressive/provocative email, I stick to my
+1. However, you all have valid points to keep it.
--
Tony Marston
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