From: Akinori MUSHA <knu@...>
Date: 2000-10-10T03:02:07+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:5344] Re: Ruby vs PHP ?

Hi matju,

At Tue, 10 Oct 2000 02:23:28 +0900,
Mathieu Bouchard <matju@cam.org> wrote:
> > First of all, PHP is characterized as an embedded language in HTML
> > documents.  Its grammar is likely to be a mixture of Perl and
> > JavaScript, with some Java's OO flavor.
> 
> I must say PHP3 is the first "OO-supporting" language I've ever seen
> lacking support for SmallTalk's "super" (or Self's "resend"). Also, it
> seems that all extension module functions were thrown into the main
> package, and no OO allowed; so you had [1] to pollute the main package,
> and you had [2] to write yourself a wrapper. 
> 
> Thus, PHP3's OO is very unlike Perl's, Python's, Java's, and Ruby's, etc.
> Note that I didn't take a look at PHP4. 

I was talking about PHP4, which has more developed OO support.

You can see Perl, JavaScript and Java flavors from the following piece
of PHP4 code:

	class Bar extends Foo {
	  var $foo;
	
	  function method1($arg1, $arg2) {
	    $this->$foo[$arg1] = $arg2;
	  }
	}

> >  Ruby can be used for general purposes, as well as some
> > specialized purposes.
> 
> Well, I thought general-purpose is for many purposes, while
> special-purpose is for small sets of purposes. In this sense, PHP is a
> language that started blatantly too-special purpose and which is growing
> towards general-purpose. Someday it will be found that there is no such
> thing as a "web programming language".

Likely to be.  However, there'll still be a big difference between "a
xyz-purpose language with OO features" and "an OO language with xyz
feature".

-- 
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Akinori -Aki- MUSHA aka / (_ /  ( (__(  @ idaemons.org / FreeBSD.org

"We're only at home when we're on the run, on the wing, on the fly"