ASchroder.com

I’ll preface this post by saying that the hours spent chasing bugs after 1AM are seldom remembered fondly. So perhaps that’s causing some bias in my opinion – bear it in mind.

I’m really learning PHP as I go along, so you can imagine my suprise when at 3AM I discovered the reason I wasn’t seeing an out of memory error was because in PHP:

@<any statement>

is the same as an empty try/catch:

try {
   <any statement>
} catch {}

From the PHP syntax docs the @ symbol means:

“When prepended to an expression in PHP, any error messages that might be generated by that expression will be ignored”

You can read all about this bad language design – particularly funny is the warning they have included!

Is typing out an empty try/catch really that hard? Most decent IDE’s will do it for you. I’m struggling to see the reason why anyone would want this functionality, but would love to hear from anyone who knows.

The problem I have with it is the lack of transparency – the more features like this in a language the more difficult it becomes to read and maintain the code. One of the things I like about Java is the simple syntax. Yes that will make a language take up more ‘lines of code’ but when your IDE is writing all the boilerplate code for you, who cares? At least you know there are no special operators or obscure syntax features that will catch developers out.

It probably has a bit to do with the static typing vs dynamic typing. IDE’s generally have a hard time writing code for you if they do not know what type of objects you are dealing with. Dynamic languages tend to be terse, and the more symbols you have, the terser your applications can become.

Moral of the story: be suspicious of any syntax you haven’t seen before in PHP – no matter how innocuous it may seem.

You might also be interested in:

1. PHP 1, Java 0: The method assertEquals(Object, Object) is ambiguous for the type
2. shuffle() or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love PHP