Derick Rethans 0:15

Hi, I’m Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language.

Derick Rethans 0:24

This is Episode 70. Today I’m talking with George Peter Banyard, about a new RFC that he’s just proposed for PHP 8.1, which is titled explicit octal literal. Hello George, would you please introduce yourself?

George Peter Banyard 0:38

Hello Derick, I’m George Peter Banyard, I’m a student at Imperial College London, and I contribute to PHP in my free time.

Derick Rethans 0:46

Excellent, and the contribution that you’re currently have up is titled: explicit octal literal. What is the problem that this is trying to solve?

George Peter Banyard 0:56

Currently in PHP, we have four types of integer literals. So decimal numbers, hexadecimal, binary, and octal. Decimal is just your normal decimal numbers; hexadecimal starts with 0x, and then hexadecimal characters so, null to nine and A to F, and then binary starts with 0b, and then it’s only zeros and ones. However, octal notation is just a decimal, something which looks like a decimal number, which was a leading zero, which doesn’t really look that much different than a decimal number, but it comes from the days from C and everything which just uses like a zero as a prefix.

Derick Rethans 1:48

But I have seen is people using like array keys for the, for the month names right and they use 01, 02, 03, you get 07, and 08 and 09, and then they look at the arrays. They notice that they actually had the zeroth element in there but no, but no eight or nine. That’s something that is that PHP no longer does I believe. No, it’s mostly that the parser doesn’t pick it up anymore. Instead of silently ignoring the eight, it’ll just give you an error. You’ve mentioned that there’s these four types of numbers with octal being the one started with zero. But what’s the problem with is that a moment?

George Peter Banyard 2:31

Sometimes when you want to use, which looks like decimal number. So, for example, you’re trying to order months, and use like the full two digits for the month number, instead of just one, you use 01, as an array key. When you get to array, it will parse error because it can’t pass 08 as an octal number, which is very confusing, because it. Most people don’t deal with octal numbers that often, and you would expect everything to be decimal. Because numeric strings are always decimal, but not integers literals. So, the proposal is to add an explicit octal notation, which would be 0o. So python does that, JavaScript has it, Rust also has it, to allow like a by more explicit to say oh I’m dealing with an octal number here. This is intended.

Derick Rethans 3:33

Beyond having the 0b for binary, and the 0x for hexadecimal, the addition of 0o for octal is the plan to add. And is that it?

George Peter Banyard 3:45

That’s more or less the proposal. It’s non-BC, because the parser before would just parse or if you had 0o, so t

Although PHP 8 is now in the Release Candidate phase, some changes are still happening which requires remediation in Xdebug. I expect that to continue until 8.0.0 is released, which means that Xdebug 3.0.0 can also not be released until that happens, likely on November 26th. Xdebug 3.0.0 will however follow quickly after that.

I have been working on the web site for Xdebug Cloud, and have been testing the integration with PhpStorm. It all seems to work well, although I’m only the one user.

Once I’ve found somebody to design the site for me, I will open up Xdebug Cloud through a private alpha.

In October, no new supporters signed up, but a few existing supports renewed.

Thank you Dennis Lassiter!

Derick Rethans 0:15

Hi, I’m Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language.

Derick Rethans 0:24

Hello, this is Episode 69. Today I’m talking with Larry Garfield, about an RFC that he’s just announced called short functions. Hello Larry, would you please introduce yourself?

Larry Garfield 0:35

Hello World, I’m Larry Garfield, the director of developer experience at platform.sh. These days, you may know me in the PHP world mainly from my work with PHP FIG. The recent book on functional programming in PHP. And I’ve gotten more involved in internals in the last several months which is why we’re here.

Derick Rethans 0:57

I’m pretty sure we’ll get back to functional programming in a moment, and your book that you’ve written about it. But first let’s talk about short functions, what are short functions, what is the problem that are trying to solve?

Larry Garfield 1:11

Well that starts with the book actually. Oh. Earlier this year, I published a book called Thinking functionally in PHP, on functional programming in PHP, during which I do write a lot of functional code, you know, that kind of goes with the territory. And one of the things I found was that the syntax for short functions, or arrow function, or can be short lambdas, or arrow functions, you know whatever name you want to give them, was really nice for functions where the whole function is just one expression. Which when you’re doing functional code is really really common. And it was kind of annoying to have to write the long version with curly braces in PSR 2, PSR 12 format for functions that I wanted to have a name, but we’re really just one line anyway does return, blah blah blah. It worked, got the job done.

Larry Garfield 2:13

Then hanging around with internals people, friend of the pod Nikita Popov mentioned that it should be really easy. Now that we’ve got short functions, or short lambdas, do the same thing for named functions. And I thought about. Yeah, that should be doable just in the lexer, which means, even I might be able to pull it off given my paltry miniscule knowledge of PHP internals. So, I took a stab at it and it turned out to be pretty easy. Short functions are just a more compact syntax for writing functions or methods, where the whole thing is just returning an expression.

Derick Rethans 2:56

Just a single expression?

Larry Garfield 2:58

Yes. If your function is returning two parameters multiplied together, it’s a trivial case but you often have functions or methods that are doing. Just one expression and then returning the value. It’s a shorter way of writing that. Mirrored on the syntax that short lambdas use. It doesn’t enable you to really do anything new, it just lets you write things in a more compact fashion. But the advantage I see is not just less typing. It lets you think about functions in a more expression type way, that this function is simply a map from input to this expression, which is a mindset shift. So yes it’s less typing but it’s also I can think about my problem as simply an expression translatio