I have, though I admit it's been about 10 years since and my memory may be mixin...

okeuro49 · on May 11, 2023

You're really doing a disservice to others with opinions that are so out of date.

jusssi · on May 11, 2023

https://symfony.com/doc/current/page_creation.html

Apparently there's now something called annotation routes. Which appear to be inferring functionality from comments.

You made me look though. I suppose I had it coming.

Arkounay · on May 11, 2023

They are not comments they are php8 attributes

Nullabillity · on May 12, 2023

# is a PHP comment syntax. #[foo] is as much of a comment as #foo is.

pfsalter · on May 12, 2023

Not since PHP8 it's not [0], it's a real part of the language that you can read and view using reflection

[0] https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.attributes.overview.p...

Nullabillity · on May 12, 2023

It's still using a subset of the comment syntax, and will still be ignored as comments rather than hard-fail in earlier versions.

Unknown attributes are also ignored silently, which isn't really a good sign.

tored · on May 12, 2023

This is one of the reasons I like PHP, in newer PHP versions it is an attribute but in older versions it is just a comment. Clever and backwards compatible.

Nullabillity · on May 12, 2023

It isn't backwards compatible (`#[foo` used to be legal PHP 7, but is illegal in PHP 8).

It may technically be forwards compatible syntactically (`#[foo]` will, as you say, just be ignored by PHP 7), but that's an anti-feature (assuming that the attribute isn't a no-op, it'll presumably break something else).

tored · on May 12, 2023

Okay, forward compatible. It makes it easier for framework and library maintainers to support multiple versions of PHP, which is nice.

> `#[foo` used to be legal PHP 7, but is illegal in PHP 8).

So it is not a comment in PHP8 then.

jusssi · on May 11, 2023

PHP8 attributes are comments with a special format.

hazn · on May 11, 2023

They are not. Attributes are metadata that can reflected/accessed at runtime: https://php.watch/versions/8.0/attributes

zeroimpl · on May 12, 2023

Comments can also be accessed at runtime :)

psychoslave · on May 24, 2023

And a program can generally read its source code and make fancy adhoc interpretation, sure. That’s nowhere close to specified facilities that you are guarantied to be able to use with a fair amount of trust in the resulting outcome with the regular toolbox.