PHP interpreters are very common, but the PHP syntax & libraries are inconsistent & cumbersome (IMO, of course). I think a language that compiles into PHP but provides higher level level features (like, modules, mixins, list comprehensions, etc...) and easier syntax (like optional semicolons, implied returns, no dollar sign for variables, optional brackets and braces, etc...) would be valuable. Does anything like this exist?
I've been researching this a lot and at the moment it seems the answer is no. I'm the author of exactly such a project called Snowscript - it is far from complete, but the documentation is pretty good and some things do work. Would love to hear feedback of what you think about the syntax!
The short answer is "no." CoffeeScript rose to popularity because of a unique confluence of factors. For one, as Wesley points out, JavaScript has a monopoly on the browser platform, while PHP only has a monopoly on .php files. On your own servers, if you don't like PHP, you can just use Ruby, Python, Perl, or any of the myriad JVM or .NET languages.
Another factor is that JavaScript's design was something of an accident. Its creator, Brendan Eich, was told to "make it look like Java"; but semantically, it has more in common with Lisp and Smalltalk. CoffeeScript arguably provides a syntax that's a better fit with JavaScript's inner workings.
JavaScript's own syntactic evolution is severely hindered by the need to maintain compatibility with older browsers. PHP suffers no such limitations, as anyone who's transitioned their code from PHP4 to PHP5 can attest. If you want to make JavaScript a better language, you need a precompiler. If you want to make PHP a better language, post a feature request for PHP6. (Edit: In my original answer, I fell for an April Fool's joke claiming that PHP6 had been released in 2010. Obviously I'm not a PHP guy...)
All of that said, it could be cool to have a language that's like CoffeeScript for PHP. The ongoing success of WordPress, and its use on servers that users often have little control over, attests to PHP's unique place as a deployed language. It's also difficult to use PHP with alternative markup languages like Haml. Perhaps an alternative markup language combined with a fresh PHP syntax could produce a compelling enough reason for people to precompile their PHP.
Browsing and surfing the web I've found http://mammouth.boutglay.com/ looks like the most similar to coffee-script language for PHP. Seems to do the job.
If I've understood what you want correctly, then there's Haxe, which can target PHP, as well as Flash, JavaScript, and others.
I've only ever used it for Flash but found it very useful.
If you like Lisps, have a look at Pharen. I haven't needed to use it yet, but it looks pretty nice - it has defmacro and even transforms tail recursion into loops.
#gosukiwi made Blueberry, which looks like this:
/*
I'm a multiline comment
*/
a = 1 # variable definition
# you can use JSON syntax to define associative arrays
arr = { "name": "Mike", "age": 18, "meta": { "items": [1, 2, 3] } }
if a == 1
echo("Hello, World!")
end
for i in (0..10)
echo(i)
end
class MyClass < MyParentClass
#name
def Greet
echo("Hello! My name is " & #name)
end
end
They also mentioned it in this comment.
Currently there is no production-ready or completed coffeescript-like language/compiler for PHP.
I am the author of CoffeePHP, and is working on the compiler for the shorter syntax. it's actually another language.
https://github.com/c9s/coffeephp
Of course, you might be aware of this, but you could simply use nodejs with CoffeeScript... (unless you're specifically attached to PHP)
This library isn't like CoffeeScript, in itself, but it's a foundation for rewriting PHP to declare and use your own syntax. I don't have any experience with it, so don't read this as an endorsement, just an observation. https://github.com/theseer/preprocessor
Take a look at coffescript-php project which is compatible with coffescript 1.3.1 on github can be found at https://github.com/alxlit/coffeescript-php
Related
Lately I've been using # instead of // for doing single line comments inside my code. However, I see most of the people prefer //.
Is there a particular reason for preferring them instead of #? Performance? File weight? Anything?
It doesn't change a single thing, I'd say ; it's just a matter of habits :
// comes from C, and exists in several languages used by lots of people.
# comes from shell and Perl, and exists in not as many "important" languages as // -- so less people use it.
And why are those two both available in PHP ? Well, PHP has been built with people knowing both C, Shell, and Perl, and they have brought what they liked from those languages ;-)
I'd probably stick with // simply because it's the same in JavaScript, and when you code PHP, you're likely going to have some JavaScript in your files as well. (Most websites use JavaScript nowadays.)
This way, your comments look the same, regardless of the language, and it'd ease readability a small bit.
I would only suggest you use // or /* */. As your programs grow you may wish to use a documentator like phpdoc to automate documentation for your program and most of these documentators as well as IDE's will only accept these two.
For single line comments, there is no significant technical reason for prefering // over the octothorpe (that's what the Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide calls #) or vice versa. // seems to the more common choice out there in the wild.
I think it's merely a matter of taste and preference. The # as comment marker has its roots in shell scripts while // goes back to C++ so depending on the people who read your code and their background one or the other might look unfamiliar.
You can use #, but // is much more common.
It is also the agreed upon Code Convention in PEAR.
IDE support may be a reason. For instance, with Eclipse you can automatically comment and uncomment blocks with //, but not with # (with the PHP plugin; the Python plugin does #). Looking at it that way, it depends on the IDE you and your collaborators use.
"//" seems more consistent with the "/* */" block comments to me. But apart from that, I know of no reason to prefer one over the other.
Both of them are serving the same exact purpose: commenting out some piece of code.
I'd prefer # because it takes 1 byte. // takes 2 bytes. ;)
PHP interpreters are very common, but the PHP syntax & libraries are inconsistent & cumbersome (IMO, of course). I think a language that compiles into PHP but provides higher level level features (like, modules, mixins, list comprehensions, etc...) and easier syntax (like optional semicolons, implied returns, no dollar sign for variables, optional brackets and braces, etc...) would be valuable. Does anything like this exist?
I've been researching this a lot and at the moment it seems the answer is no. I'm the author of exactly such a project called Snowscript - it is far from complete, but the documentation is pretty good and some things do work. Would love to hear feedback of what you think about the syntax!
The short answer is "no." CoffeeScript rose to popularity because of a unique confluence of factors. For one, as Wesley points out, JavaScript has a monopoly on the browser platform, while PHP only has a monopoly on .php files. On your own servers, if you don't like PHP, you can just use Ruby, Python, Perl, or any of the myriad JVM or .NET languages.
Another factor is that JavaScript's design was something of an accident. Its creator, Brendan Eich, was told to "make it look like Java"; but semantically, it has more in common with Lisp and Smalltalk. CoffeeScript arguably provides a syntax that's a better fit with JavaScript's inner workings.
JavaScript's own syntactic evolution is severely hindered by the need to maintain compatibility with older browsers. PHP suffers no such limitations, as anyone who's transitioned their code from PHP4 to PHP5 can attest. If you want to make JavaScript a better language, you need a precompiler. If you want to make PHP a better language, post a feature request for PHP6. (Edit: In my original answer, I fell for an April Fool's joke claiming that PHP6 had been released in 2010. Obviously I'm not a PHP guy...)
All of that said, it could be cool to have a language that's like CoffeeScript for PHP. The ongoing success of WordPress, and its use on servers that users often have little control over, attests to PHP's unique place as a deployed language. It's also difficult to use PHP with alternative markup languages like Haml. Perhaps an alternative markup language combined with a fresh PHP syntax could produce a compelling enough reason for people to precompile their PHP.
Browsing and surfing the web I've found http://mammouth.boutglay.com/ looks like the most similar to coffee-script language for PHP. Seems to do the job.
If I've understood what you want correctly, then there's Haxe, which can target PHP, as well as Flash, JavaScript, and others.
I've only ever used it for Flash but found it very useful.
If you like Lisps, have a look at Pharen. I haven't needed to use it yet, but it looks pretty nice - it has defmacro and even transforms tail recursion into loops.
#gosukiwi made Blueberry, which looks like this:
/*
I'm a multiline comment
*/
a = 1 # variable definition
# you can use JSON syntax to define associative arrays
arr = { "name": "Mike", "age": 18, "meta": { "items": [1, 2, 3] } }
if a == 1
echo("Hello, World!")
end
for i in (0..10)
echo(i)
end
class MyClass < MyParentClass
#name
def Greet
echo("Hello! My name is " & #name)
end
end
They also mentioned it in this comment.
Currently there is no production-ready or completed coffeescript-like language/compiler for PHP.
I am the author of CoffeePHP, and is working on the compiler for the shorter syntax. it's actually another language.
https://github.com/c9s/coffeephp
Of course, you might be aware of this, but you could simply use nodejs with CoffeeScript... (unless you're specifically attached to PHP)
This library isn't like CoffeeScript, in itself, but it's a foundation for rewriting PHP to declare and use your own syntax. I don't have any experience with it, so don't read this as an endorsement, just an observation. https://github.com/theseer/preprocessor
Take a look at coffescript-php project which is compatible with coffescript 1.3.1 on github can be found at https://github.com/alxlit/coffeescript-php
PHP interpreters are very common, but the PHP syntax & libraries are inconsistent & cumbersome (IMO, of course). I think a language that compiles into PHP but provides higher level level features (like, modules, mixins, list comprehensions, etc...) and easier syntax (like optional semicolons, implied returns, no dollar sign for variables, optional brackets and braces, etc...) would be valuable. Does anything like this exist?
I've been researching this a lot and at the moment it seems the answer is no. I'm the author of exactly such a project called Snowscript - it is far from complete, but the documentation is pretty good and some things do work. Would love to hear feedback of what you think about the syntax!
The short answer is "no." CoffeeScript rose to popularity because of a unique confluence of factors. For one, as Wesley points out, JavaScript has a monopoly on the browser platform, while PHP only has a monopoly on .php files. On your own servers, if you don't like PHP, you can just use Ruby, Python, Perl, or any of the myriad JVM or .NET languages.
Another factor is that JavaScript's design was something of an accident. Its creator, Brendan Eich, was told to "make it look like Java"; but semantically, it has more in common with Lisp and Smalltalk. CoffeeScript arguably provides a syntax that's a better fit with JavaScript's inner workings.
JavaScript's own syntactic evolution is severely hindered by the need to maintain compatibility with older browsers. PHP suffers no such limitations, as anyone who's transitioned their code from PHP4 to PHP5 can attest. If you want to make JavaScript a better language, you need a precompiler. If you want to make PHP a better language, post a feature request for PHP6. (Edit: In my original answer, I fell for an April Fool's joke claiming that PHP6 had been released in 2010. Obviously I'm not a PHP guy...)
All of that said, it could be cool to have a language that's like CoffeeScript for PHP. The ongoing success of WordPress, and its use on servers that users often have little control over, attests to PHP's unique place as a deployed language. It's also difficult to use PHP with alternative markup languages like Haml. Perhaps an alternative markup language combined with a fresh PHP syntax could produce a compelling enough reason for people to precompile their PHP.
Browsing and surfing the web I've found http://mammouth.boutglay.com/ looks like the most similar to coffee-script language for PHP. Seems to do the job.
If I've understood what you want correctly, then there's Haxe, which can target PHP, as well as Flash, JavaScript, and others.
I've only ever used it for Flash but found it very useful.
If you like Lisps, have a look at Pharen. I haven't needed to use it yet, but it looks pretty nice - it has defmacro and even transforms tail recursion into loops.
#gosukiwi made Blueberry, which looks like this:
/*
I'm a multiline comment
*/
a = 1 # variable definition
# you can use JSON syntax to define associative arrays
arr = { "name": "Mike", "age": 18, "meta": { "items": [1, 2, 3] } }
if a == 1
echo("Hello, World!")
end
for i in (0..10)
echo(i)
end
class MyClass < MyParentClass
#name
def Greet
echo("Hello! My name is " & #name)
end
end
They also mentioned it in this comment.
Currently there is no production-ready or completed coffeescript-like language/compiler for PHP.
I am the author of CoffeePHP, and is working on the compiler for the shorter syntax. it's actually another language.
https://github.com/c9s/coffeephp
Of course, you might be aware of this, but you could simply use nodejs with CoffeeScript... (unless you're specifically attached to PHP)
This library isn't like CoffeeScript, in itself, but it's a foundation for rewriting PHP to declare and use your own syntax. I don't have any experience with it, so don't read this as an endorsement, just an observation. https://github.com/theseer/preprocessor
Take a look at coffescript-php project which is compatible with coffescript 1.3.1 on github can be found at https://github.com/alxlit/coffeescript-php
I'm looking for a way to have to write and maintain a certain algorithm (a graphics rendering sub-module of my code, actually) only once. I need the algorithm in C++, PHP and Javascript. Theoretically I could write it in C++ and wrap it into a PHP extension; but that has many issues of itself and doesn't solve the Javascript link.
What I'm looking for, I think, is a tool that converts from a language (doesn't matter which one) into the three (or two, if the source language is one of the three) output languages I'm targetting. I've found MetaL (http://www.meta-language.net/) which seems to do what I want but also looks dead (no updates since 2007) and only targets one of the three languages I need. It needs to be quite flexible and allow me to update the results - for example, I use Cairo in my C++ and PHP rendering, and HTML Canvas on the Javascript side. So I need to customize to the API for certain effects.
Alternatively, I'd settle for a PHP parser and lexer that would give me an AST with enough information for me to write generators for C++ and Javascript as an alternative backend.
Any ideas? Thanks.
You could take a look at Haxe. Haxe is an open source programming language. It can be compiled to JavaScript, Flash/ActionScript, PHP, C++, Java, C#, Python and Lua.
The Emscripten project (which I only spotted last week) might interest you: http://syntensity.blogspot.com/2011/04/emscripten-10.html
This guy has basically written a compiler for C/C++ that compiles to Javascript code.
That should solve the Javascript side of your problem.
Hope that helps.
Another product along the same lines, and a bit more well known is Google Web Toolkit (GWT). It's based on Java, but the end result is similar -- you write your web application in Java code and it compiles the front-end parts into Javascript and the back-end parts into regular Java bytecode. I know you're not asking for Java, but if it interest you, the link is here: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
Slightly less useful, but possibly more relevant to your question is PHPJS. This is a project to implement as much of the PHP language in Javascript as possible. They're doing it on a function-by-function basis, so it's only ever going to be an approximation, but given that the language syntaxes are similar, it may be possible to use it to write code that works unchanged in native PHP and also in Javascript on the client side.
Of course the one big down-side of compiling one language into another is that the resulting code is always going to be sub-optimal. There's not much you can do about that, but it's worth bearing in mind before you start down the path of writing a shared code-base in a single language.
Maybe look into 'coding' your original algorithm in xml and using various xslt templates to output to your target languages ? Or possibly antlr (http://www.antlr.org/ http://www.amazon.com/Definitive-Antlr-Reference-Domain-Specific-Programmers/dp/0978739256/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1303114884&sr=1-1).
Maybe you can just Write it in javascript and then use a C++ and PHP javascript interpreter.
A completely different approach would be to use assembly code. Write the algorithm in a language of your choice, compile it to ASM source. Then provide the interface wrappers in the deployment languages.
Of course this is all so much 'air pie'. It depends upon so many variables, number of target platforms, importance of optimization, frequency of interface change related to implementation change etc etc
Lately I've been using # instead of // for doing single line comments inside my code. However, I see most of the people prefer //.
Is there a particular reason for preferring them instead of #? Performance? File weight? Anything?
It doesn't change a single thing, I'd say ; it's just a matter of habits :
// comes from C, and exists in several languages used by lots of people.
# comes from shell and Perl, and exists in not as many "important" languages as // -- so less people use it.
And why are those two both available in PHP ? Well, PHP has been built with people knowing both C, Shell, and Perl, and they have brought what they liked from those languages ;-)
I'd probably stick with // simply because it's the same in JavaScript, and when you code PHP, you're likely going to have some JavaScript in your files as well. (Most websites use JavaScript nowadays.)
This way, your comments look the same, regardless of the language, and it'd ease readability a small bit.
I would only suggest you use // or /* */. As your programs grow you may wish to use a documentator like phpdoc to automate documentation for your program and most of these documentators as well as IDE's will only accept these two.
For single line comments, there is no significant technical reason for prefering // over the octothorpe (that's what the Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide calls #) or vice versa. // seems to the more common choice out there in the wild.
I think it's merely a matter of taste and preference. The # as comment marker has its roots in shell scripts while // goes back to C++ so depending on the people who read your code and their background one or the other might look unfamiliar.
You can use #, but // is much more common.
It is also the agreed upon Code Convention in PEAR.
IDE support may be a reason. For instance, with Eclipse you can automatically comment and uncomment blocks with //, but not with # (with the PHP plugin; the Python plugin does #). Looking at it that way, it depends on the IDE you and your collaborators use.
"//" seems more consistent with the "/* */" block comments to me. But apart from that, I know of no reason to prefer one over the other.
Both of them are serving the same exact purpose: commenting out some piece of code.
I'd prefer # because it takes 1 byte. // takes 2 bytes. ;)