PHP?
So for my sins I'm learning some PHP. Enough to create a custom theme for the Next Big Thing that Hilary and I are working on.
I've dealt with some evil languages in my life, from APL to GW-BASIC, but PHP is a mess. What can you say about a language that is designed to mix freely with HTML but has non-HTML comment syntax, leading to examples like this:
That's right: it's a line of PHP that is just a comment!
While I'm the first to agree that the SGML comment syntax is awkward and ugly (although it can be made simpler if you're willing to depart from the reference concrete syntax, which is endless fun although there is a risk of creating XML if you redefine NET appropriately...) it is nowhere near as awkward and ugly as the above construct. Seriously:
SGML does terrible things to the mind, too... I just spend ten minutes trying to figure out a way to appropriately redefine the concrete syntax for pi, mdo and com to allow the above PHP-style comment syntax to be used as valid SGML markup without making a mess of everything else. Fortunately, it appears to be impossible.
I've dealt with some evil languages in my life, from APL to GW-BASIC, but PHP is a mess. What can you say about a language that is designed to mix freely with HTML but has non-HTML comment syntax, leading to examples like this:
That's right: it's a line of PHP that is just a comment!
While I'm the first to agree that the SGML comment syntax is awkward and ugly (although it can be made simpler if you're willing to depart from the reference concrete syntax, which is endless fun although there is a risk of creating XML if you redefine NET appropriately...) it is nowhere near as awkward and ugly as the above construct. Seriously:
SGML does terrible things to the mind, too... I just spend ten minutes trying to figure out a way to appropriately redefine the concrete syntax for pi, mdo and com to allow the above PHP-style comment syntax to be used as valid SGML markup without making a mess of everything else. Fortunately, it appears to be impossible.