On Wednesday 28 May 2008 09:11:50 Antony Dovgal wrote:

That is, maybe, because PHP didn't introduce any "new handy syntax" that could be borrowed from other languages.

And cursed many times because it's so tedious to write ...

If you look at the other mails, you'll see that it's not about helping people that don't know PHP but other languages, but helping people writing code that is more concise and readable ... [[1,2,3], [4,5,6], [7,8,9]] is far easier to read than the same thing with array().

This "it's unreadable and confusing"-argument is odd. In years of helping people in ruby/python*-channels, I have seen many questions, many questions that would seem exceedingly dumb, but i can't recall a single time someone asking about []-literals for arrays/lists, even [] is the subscript operator too for these languages. So you'd imply that seasoned PHP developers are less quick to understand than people that are new to other languages ... Btw, do you complain because () is used a) to group expressions b) to call functions c) for language constructs like for ()? Any "wth"-moments there? Or do you wish that strings would be written as string(foo) instead of "foo"?

* Even a language that has the guideline "explicit is better than implicit" preferred [] because it's clear and concise ... doesn't that make you wonder?

Regards, Stefan