Derick Rethans: No to a Uniform Variable Syntax

There's been an RFC that's recently made it through the voting process and was approved for inclusion in PHP6, the uniform variable syntax handling. When these changes are put into effect, some of the odd syntax you had to use for things like variable variables will be cleared up and standardized. However, Derick Rethans stood out as the only "no" vote, here's why...

As you might have heard, PHP developers voted on an RFC called "Uniform Variable Syntax". This RFC "proposes the introduction of an internally consistent and complete variable syntax". In general, this RFC argues for making PHP's parser more complete for all sorts of variable dereferences. [...] Thirty people voted for, and one against: Me. Does that mean that I am against a unified variable syntax? No, I am not. I am actually quite a fan of having a consistent language, but we need to be careful when this hits existing users.

He points out that there's known backwards compatibility breaks in the changes and this breaks the semantics of the language. While the BC breaks are understood, Derick suggests that this is one of the worst changes a language can make: "...and this is exactly why people whine that PHP breaks BC and does not care about its users".

Link: http://derickrethans.nl/uniform-variable-syntax.html