Greetings,
Unfortunately, as you will no doubt well be aware, Anthony Ferrara, aka
ircmaxell, decided to cease contributing to PHP. This is not a matter I
wish to discuss here, but it is relevant to the subject of this email.
Because he left, he withdrew all the RFCs he authored. Since I like this
RFC of his, I have decided to copy the content of it and the patch to
new locations, and re-open it.
The RFC, so far as I can tell, looks fairly complete as it stands.
I am deciding to champion it because I think that such static
expressions are useful for code readability. The intent of, for example,
const TIME_PERIOD = 7 * 24 * 60 * 60; is much clearer than const
TIME_PERIOD = 604800;, and there are other examples of how this could be
useful.
I have read through the previous mailing list discussion, and while I
will admit that, yes, this RFC does not allow some possibilities that
would be nice (like using constants in such expressions, for example), I
think it is still quite useful and an improvement on the status quo.
So far as I can tell, there are no remaining unanswered questions or
unresolved issues with this, so if that is the case I would like to move
this towards a vote fairly soon.
The new RFC is here: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/const_scalar_expressions2
It is identical in content aside from a changed header and links. If
this could be added to the list of RFCs Under Discussion that'd be great.
Thank you for your time.
