On: Go with PHP

[jusssi]

https://symfony.com/doc/current/page_creation.html

Apparently there's now something called annotation routes. Which appear to be inferring functionality from comments.

You made me look though. I suppose I had it coming.

[Arkounay → jusssi]

They are not comments they are php8 attributes

[Nullabillity → Arkounay]

# is a PHP comment syntax. #[foo] is as much of a comment as #foo is.

[pfsalter → Nullabillity]

Not since PHP8 it's not [0], it's a real part of the language that you can read and view using reflection

[0] https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.attributes.overview.p...

[Nullabillity → pfsalter]

It's still using a subset of the comment syntax, and will still be ignored as comments rather than hard-fail in earlier versions.

Unknown attributes are also ignored silently, which isn't really a good sign.

[tored → Nullabillity]

This is one of the reasons I like PHP, in newer PHP versions it is an attribute but in older versions it is just a comment. Clever and backwards compatible.

[Nullabillity → tored]

It isn't backwards compatible (`#[foo` used to be legal PHP 7, but is illegal in PHP 8).

It may technically be forwards compatible syntactically (`#[foo]` will, as you say, just be ignored by PHP 7), but that's an anti-feature (assuming that the attribute isn't a no-op, it'll presumably break something else).

[tored → Nullabillity]

Okay, forward compatible. It makes it easier for framework and library maintainers to support multiple versions of PHP, which is nice.

> `#[foo` used to be legal PHP 7, but is illegal in PHP 8).

So it is not a comment in PHP8 then.

[jusssi → Arkounay]

PHP8 attributes are comments with a special format.

[hazn → jusssi]

They are not. Attributes are metadata that can reflected/accessed at runtime: https://php.watch/versions/8.0/attributes

[zeroimpl → hazn]

Comments can also be accessed at runtime :)

[psychoslave → zeroimpl]

And a program can generally read its source code and make fancy adhoc interpretation, sure. That’s nowhere close to specified facilities that you are guarantied to be able to use with a fair amount of trust in the resulting outcome with the regular toolbox.