4 ms·
It _is_ their fault, for repeating the stupid mistakes that Kernighan, Ritchie, et al made when designing Unix and C.
by rafekett 13y ago
It _is_ their fault, for repeating the stupid mistakes that Kernighan, Ritchie, et al made when designing Unix and C.
- pdog 13y agoShort names weren't really a mistake when K&R made them.
- rafekett 13y agoYes, for some time (the dark ages I like to think) programmers had to sacrifice productivity to make things faster, or to make them fit in memory. The original C compiler had a 6 character limit on variable names, leading to abominations like `strstr()`. Fortunately, by the Pentium era, which was when PHP was designed, those times were long gone. "X made this design decision before us" is never a good justification for any design decision unless the decision is truly arbitrary (i.e., are arrays 0 or 1 indexed?) -- then it might be better to stick to what's more familiar. If it was a good design decision then, then there must have been some reason at the time that should be true now to give a good case for repeating a design decision.
- Crito 13y agoI find the juxtaposition between PHP's short function names taken from C, and things like T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM to be rather funny.
- e-tron 13y agorecently(not quite) there was a talk in php internals about changing that. read this: http://philsturgeon.co.uk/blog/2013/09/t-paamayim-nekudotayim-v-sanity http://philsturgeon.co.uk/blog/2013/09/t-paamayim-nekudotayi...
- Crito 13y agoWell, so long as they don't fix the parsing of octal int literals that is okay. Loosing both of my favourite offhand complaints would be rather disappointing. ;)
- userbinator 13y agoNever seen that one, but I think it's cute.