On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 7:56 PM, Curtis Maurand <curtis@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Sebastian Krebs wrote: > Actually the problem is, that the dot "." is already in use. With > $foo.bar() you cannot tell, if you want to call the method "bar()" on the > > object "$foo", or if you want to concatenate the value of "$foo" to the > > result of the function "bar()". There is no other way around this than a > > different operator for method calls. > > I didn't think > of that. It seems to me there could be an easier operator than -> > which sometimes will make me stop and look at what keys I'm trying to > hit. Just a thought. I forgot about the concatenation operator > which is "+" in Java/C# > The PHP language developers were pretty stuck. Because of automatic string-to-numeric-conversion, they couldn't use + for string concatenation. Sadly, they chose "." rather than ".." which I believe one or two other languages use. If they had, "." would have been available once objects rolled around in PHP 4/5. I suspect they chose -> since that's used in C and C++ to dereference a pointer. > > Ever tried the jetbrains products? :D (No, they don't pay me) > > I have not, but it looks interesting. > I'll have to try it. Those are very good products which have had a strong following for a decade. The free IDE NetBeans also has quite good support for both Java and PHP, and the latest beta version provides a "web" project that provides front- and back-end debugging of PHP + JavaScript. You can be stepping through JS code and hit an AJAX call and then seamlessly step through the PHP code that handles it. I use NetBeans for PHP/HTML/JS (though I am evaluating JetBrains' PHPStorm now) and Eclipse for Java. You can't beat Eclipse's refactoring support in a free tool, though I think NetBeans is close to catching up. I would bet IntelliJ IDEA for Java by JetBrains is on par at least. Peace, David
