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> And the worst being the attribute #[] syntax... why?! Hah. Since the initial RFC was agreed, I think there were three changes to the syntax because no-one co

> And the worst being the attribute #[] syntax... why?! Hah. Since the initial RFC was agreed, I think there were three changes to the syntax because no-one could agree. At one point it was going to be `@@attribute`. #[] is similar to or the same as Rust, I believe. It also has the advantage of being backwards compatible; while rarely used, comments in PHP can start with # instead of //, so older versions of PHP will just see an attribute as a comment. Of course, that also means that a comment in old code might now be interpreted as an attribute, but there you go. Single @ is probably a no go because @ is already the error suppressing operator. Now, in my opinion that should be ejected from the language with extreme prejudice, but I doubt it ever will be.

Supermancho 6y ago
PHP laughably adds warts almost as fast as it removes them, then codifies the new ones as intentional. Hack was a good attempt, but I fear it's too late to fix the soup of features by forking/cloning. I sincerely believe another language will replace it (not python), if they havent already (javascript shudder). I've used PHP professionally for over 20 years along with other languages. The decisioning of language design, at large, has been mired in "good enough and doesn't break backward compatibility" nonsense all over the spectrum. PHP was the poster child of thinking differently in the 90s. Make the languages BETTER by looking at others, not clutching your Perls /s. Arcane sigils are not the way forward, that's a known (eg Erlang, Haskell, Pony, Perl, etc), even with powerful features that put existing languages to shame.