To me, this is like designing a language with // as a division operator. You can do it, but it strongly signals that you're not interested in the relationship between your language and C. That's fine. But if you tell me this is a superset of C that uses // as a division operator, I assume you are not designing from a place of experience. That's what this says to me.
> But if you tell me this is a superset of C that uses // as a division operator, [...]
Just in case, you are referring to C89, right? (Such language can't be a superset of C99 or later.)
> That's what this says to me.
I haven't written any PHP for years, but I think `<?` was already heavily discouraged back when I was still doing PHP things. Any surviving PHP codebases should have a similar guideline (for example, [1] for WordPress).
The `<?` isn't the problem, it's the closing `}?>`. Processing instructions don't nest. They're also xml, not html, so jolly good luck getting WHATWG to put them into the HTML standard.
