[development] Cleaner and more consistent code.

[Larry Garfield]

On Friday 03 August 2007, adrian rossouw wrote:
> On 03 Aug 2007, at 2:28 PM, Jeff Eaton wrote:
> > Honestly, this straightforward nesting syntax is the only reason
> > that I've felt we should steer away from objects in D6. the use of
> > # to mean 'property' took a log of explaining. Getting rid of that,
> > while maintaining the clean nesting syntax, would be a huge huge win.
>
> Next, I really wish that somewhere down the road php gets named
> parameters. That would be the fscking awesome.
> So instead of doing :
>
> $form['title'] = new drupal_textfield(array('title' => 'blah',
> 'default_value' => blah));
>
> we could do :
>
> $form['title'] = new drupal_textfield(title = 'blah', default_value =
> 'blah');

Bug the php-internals folks. ;-)

One thing that I've been considering lately is that FAPI structure are right 
now about 90% compatible with SimpleXML.  SimpleXML uses ArrayObject, and 
child objects are referenced with -> while properties are referenced with [].  
Then you get all sorts of iteration magic with it, the ability to trivially 
dump to/from XML, etc.  

That other 10%, though, is array properties.  #options is an array, by nature, 
and therefore can't easily serialize to XML.  I don't know if there's a good 
solution for that.

That said, a syntax that somewhat parallels SimpleXML and leverages 
ArrayObject, iterators, and the rest of SPL, but just doesn't translate 
directly to XML the way SimpleXML does, could make FAPI a lot cleaner and 
more intuitive.

Oh, so many options... :-)  (Go vote for the "Drupal and PHP5" Barcelona 
presentation that chx and I want to give so we can discuss this in person!)

-- 
Larry Garfield			AIM: LOLG42
larry at garfieldtech.com		ICQ: 6817012

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of 
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which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to 
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of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."  -- Thomas 
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