After rather heated discussions on IRC over the last week, concerning StudlyCaps naming and php core. The core php developers (from what I saw) appear to be close to agreeing on some changes for PHP5.1
- Finally we will get Case sensitive functions / methods
- the _ underscore naming convention for PHP functions will be gradually replaced with StudlyCaps for all objects, methods and functions.
Alot of the discussion centered around the impact this may have on old code, In general it was the concensus that it would only break really bad code hosted on sourceforge, which wouldnt be a complete disaster..
I have to admit it was pretty rare to see such agreement in such an argumentative group, but they considered consitency to be the ultimate goal, and it would make the life fo developers considerably easier.
Some of the core deadlines in the strategy are
- Changing the manual to add the extra 500+ functions, and make the old ones redirect to new ones, (eg. going to www.php.net/array_count would redirect automatically to www.php.net/arrayCount) this is expected to be complete by July
- For adding the aliases in, Lukas Smith was unanomously nominated to undertake the code changes, normally a core PEAR developer this will be his first major expedition into the C source code. it is expected that this will be completed by November.
In the meantime, they do recommend that if you are using any of the existing under_scored methods, that you write short wrappers to ensure that when they are removed in PHP5.1, that your applications work:
eg.
if (!function_exists('array_count')) {
function array_count($a) { return arrayCount($a); }
}
Comments
After years of having to use annoying non-enterprise friendly and highly inconsistent naming conventions PHP finally follow the footsteps of well established languages like Java and SmallTalk.
I should also mention that this changes makes integration of PHP and .NET possible, which is a big step to making PHP a corporate scripting language of choice.
Too bad this is only an April's Fool joke.
ROTFL!
Never read a better joke before! :)
Pretty nice, especially Lukas doing the alias changes in C code.
I hope this is only a joke, that would be a nightmare!
Donny
I almost cried when I found out this was a joke...
LOL. omg. thank goodness for Comments. :P
*was about to say "wtf!"*
Interesting blog, I'll keep my eye on it :D.
