[development] Time for a new chapter of an endless debate

[Darrel O'Pry]

On Mon, 2006-07-03 at 12:34 +1000, Gordon Heydon wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Jeremy Epstein wrote:
> > On 7/3/06, Gordon Heydon <gordon at heydon.com.au> wrote:
> >> This is just the tip of the ice burg.
> >>
> >> It comes down to. What extra does it give us? Nothing!
> > 
> > Not nothing. As chx explained, it gives us consistency, as well as
> > bringing the handiness of arrays (e.g. all the useful array_*
> > functions) to more variables.
> 
> Yes, consistency would be nice. so would been able to the useful 
> array_*()'s.
> 
> > But now that I think about it, this is not nearly enough of a reason
> > to justify the amount of code that will get broken (IMHO).
> 
> I see this as being about same size in changes to the formapi() with no 
> benefits. We would be spinning our wheels for 6 months and not achieving 
> anything.
> 
> I see this come up every so often, and the people who raise this don't 
> really think about what would be involved in making this change. I don't 
>   even think a change like this could be fitted into a normal release cycle.


trading -> for [' '] has nothing to do with the way we handle or
represent data as developers. It won't be a major change to the way in
which we carry and represent data and designate data handling in Drupal.

It only affects how the interpreter handles the list of variables we
store in $node, etc. and how we reference that data as developers. It is
nothing like form api, and form api 2.0 is lurking out there somewhere
anyway.