(one of my practices is to deliberately ignore a lot of error checking that I’d consider mandatory in other langs :) – anything that reduces readability or increases bloat)

I’m not sure about this but it seems to have worked best for me out of the different structures I’ve tried.

if ($foo == 0 && isset($foo))

which isn’t much of an improvement

:)

I’m not sure avoiding === is a best practice. I’d say avoiding the things that force you to use it are probably a best practice. For example, it’s common to initialize all variables to null or false and then do a if (!foo) check later to test for whether it’s ever been set. Unfortunately, there are all sorts of non-false non-null things that evaluate to false (like 0), so if your variable is intended to be an integer and you need to check for 0 later, you can’t do if (foo == 0) because null and false both match. You have to do ‘if (foo === 0)’. This is just horrifying, both to write and to debug, has no clean solutions, and is a strong argument against taking advantage of the ‘ease’ that weakly typed languages are supposed to provide. Declaring a datatype and doing some explicit casting is just not that much work.

Hmm. Point taken about perl. Although i think that what I said is true in it’s own way – if I’d phrased it better. Certainly Perl was jumped on by non programmers it seemee to me in much the same way that Rexx was, and it was great for whacking out one-liners, and for “writing what you intend to do and it’ll probably “just work” but god help you if it doesn’t and you have to start debugging”.

Perhaps I just meant that perl was a language designed to write code without planning it, which tends to support non programmers since they don’t know how to plan code even if they want to?

Also: sorry about the https, it’s a design flaw in wordpress (admin login is plaintext) they have yet to fix even after many years, and the only workaround is for me to buy a cert and force all users onto https. Only I’m too cheap to buy a cert and this one is in my trust chain so it doesn’t bother me an I keep forgetting about it! When I’m ned feeling rich I’ll pony up :). Until then: I’m sorry.

Also, I had forgotten triple equals.I now automatically design my php so that I never encounter that stufff, mainly because if found nearly all scripting languages have the same or similar problem. I guess it’s a php best practice to avoid it? Thanks!

It has closures? Yikes. How did that slip past me. I feel very stupid for missing it (I looked, but clearly not hard enough; I wasn’t particularly bothered since I rarely use them myself unless it’s a language thwyb makes heavy use of them habitually).

Thanks.

I’ll go look into that some more

1) Perl is definitely a scripting language and Perl is absolutely not ‘intended to be trivial to read and write code; the core language is “easy for a non-programmer to grasp”’. Which means that the definition of a scripting language needs work. PHP is a scriptling language that is also fairly approachable, but that’s not implied by the fact that it’s a scripting language. I think one important aspect of its approachability is that it falls within the mainline 3GL syntax. . meaning it’s imperative, uses braces for block definition, uses the typical iteration operators, etc, etc. It’s not forcing you to jump into functional syntax or significant whitespace just to do some scripting.

2) “Some things PHP is bad at”

It’s weakly typed, meaning it’s unreliable and requires ginormous hacks like the === operator.

Put this busted syllogism in your interpreter and smoke it:
var_dump(true == “true”); // bool(true);
var_dump(true == 1); // bool(true);
var_dump(1 == “true”); // bool(false);

wtf?

If you are interested or want to fix the link, i would suggest; http://www.watchhisbeardgrow.com/

It is a recent development of mine and I plan to write more and more…

But I wanted to add that php does have closures. They are not often used and I personally have not taken advantage of them yet, but they are there. It is something i plan to investigate soon. (hopefully).

I look forward to reading Part Two.

:)