Hi Juerd,

You make some excellent points about PHP, (and having spent much of the last 2 years as a PHP programmer, I agree with many of your points). In particular the namespace issue is a killer (although using OO techniques you can avoid the problem to a degree). You have also made some errors in your comments.

>>> Heck, it doesn't even have anonymous functions.

Yes it does.

>>> That's another thing: how will you be rewriting that hash of coderefs? A hash of strings that are evaled at runtime?

#!/usr/bin/php -q
<?php

error_reporting(E_ALL);

$dispatch_table = array(

        # create some anonymous functions
        'foo' => create_function('$a', 'return "foo got $a\n";'),
        'bar' => create_function('$a', 'return "bar got $a\n";'),
        'baz' => create_function('$a', 'return "baz got $a\n";')
);

print $dispatch_table['foo']('hello');
print $dispatch_table['bar']('hi');
print $dispatch_table['baz']('yo');
?>
# outputs
foo got hello
bar got hi
baz got yo
[download]

>>> Also, don't think $foo = bar() || $baz does the same in PHP. In PHP, you end up with true or false. So you must write it in two separate expressions.

$baz = "DEFAULT VALUE";
function bar(){return  "Assigned value";}
function quux(){return false;}

$foo = bar() ? bar() : $baz;
print "$foo\n";

$foo = quux() ? quux : $baz;
print "$foo\n";
# outputs
Assigned value
DEFAULT VALUE
[download]

I'm not sure if you could consider that as two separate expressions, but it seems a concise enough idiom for me.

While PHP does not have closures, I have used static variables in functions to emulate some of the behaviours I have used closures for in Perl.

Perl remains, by far, my language of choice, but I thought it would only be fair to point these things out

cheers

thinker