With more recent talk about namespaces in PHP 5.3, bloggers all over are tossing their comments into the discussion. Chris Hartjes is one of the latest with his thoughts on the point of the functionality.

I'm an outsider when it comes to tracking the going-on in the world of PHP internals. So, because of that, I'm not going to comment on the actual syntax of how namespaces will be implemented or it's impact on internals. That's not really important as far as this particular discussion goes.

He mentions one of the primary arguments for namespaces from the casual developer's perspective - keeping things separate and so classes can have the same naming as some of their cousins in other namespaces.

On the Debuggable blog, Nate Abele has posted a request for opinions on a topic that's been lighting up the PHP mailing lists (and other social media) lately - the alternative array syntax for PHP.

Well, there's a patch available, but 2/3 of the active PHP committers (who participated in the vote) voted against its inclusion. However, of the end-users participating in the discussion, 17 out of 20 voted in favor. Shortly before the voting was concluded, there was a call for some user-land input, so I decided to humbly submit my two pennies.

His comments support the idea, noting that arrays are "our bread and butter" for the language and should be updated to make them even easier to use (and more in line with the declarations of other variable types).

There's been some talk floating around about a proposed additional syntax for creating arrays in PHP. Brian Moon sums it up nicely in a new post to his blog.

So, I was asked in IRC today about the proposed short array syntax for PHP. For those that don't know, I mean the same syntax that other languages (javascript, perl, python, ruby) all have. [...] It just feels like a good addition to the language. It is common among web languages and therefore users coming into PHP from other languages may find it more comfortable.

He compares it with other data type creation in PHP (you don't call int() to make an integer, so why call array() to make an array). However, according to a post from the internals mailing list, we might not be seeing this any time soon.

"Cross-over" developers out there (those that use PHP and Javascript on a regular basis) can sometimes get confused by little syntax things. Stoyan Stefanov got tripped up by just such an issue.

The front-end developer is a strange beast who has to jiggle to and fro and code in several languages literally at the same time - javascript, html, css, php or some other server side language, some SQL dialect... No wonder that sometimes we make silly mistakes.

His issue was with appending - in Javascript, it's a plus but in PHP, it's a period. Unfortunately, the problem can be hard to track down since Javascript also has a use for the period operator - treating the preceding thing like an object.

From the RefreshinglyBlue blog, there's a new post that makes a comparison between two of the most popular web scripting languages - PHP and Ruby - on a practical, basic level.

There are rather significant syntactical differences between PHP and Ruby. For example PHP requires semicolons at the end of lines and generally requires curly brackets to enclose blocks of code. Ruby, on the other hand, uses newline characters to denote the end of a line of code...

The post goes through other differences like: value return methods, function/method naming, similarities between them, frameworks, namespaces, documentation and hosting options.

According to this new post on the Inside Open Source blog from APress, Andi Gutmas has made a for a new syntax to be added to the existing array functionality in PHP.

Derick Rethans has posted his summary of the happenings in the world of PHP as experienced through his eyes:

It's the end of the year again, and that means that I (once again) spent way too much time writing this wrap up of PHP in 2006. In this, the fifth iteration of my annual PHP Look Back, we'll explore the happenings of the PHP world in 2006.

He mentions things like the various PHP releases over the year (especially the release of 5.2), discussions and debates over some of the core functionality of PHP (variables, syntax, etc), actions of the PDM, lots of Unicode talk, and many, many suggestions for functionality to be added to the core.

Check out the full (lengthy) look back here on his website.

Sandro Groganz has two new WordPress tips for users out there looking to do some syntax highlighting in their posts and that want to move some older permalinks into a WordPress environment.

The first post spotlights a package that makes highlighting in WordPress simple - the iG:Syntax Hiliter v3.5 plugin. He includes some sample code to show how the CSS is formatted which, in itself, is a demo of what the plugin looks like.

The second article follows the steps he went through to make the move to WordPress URLs from the previous format. He leaned toward mod_rewrite, but decided to go a different way and whip up a custom 404 handler to get people where they want to go. He includes the code (all 15 lines of it) to show how he did it.

There's a new tutorial posted on the PHP-GTK Community site today - a quick one showing how to use GtkSourceview to create a simple PHP editor with syntax highlighting.

This widget is nearly usable as a real php-gtk IDE. It extends GtkSourceView widget and internally manages both a text buffer and language object classes.

They provide the code, but not too much in the way of explanation for it. Thankfully, most of it is pretty straight-forward. There are a few things that the script has to manage to make the it work - a text buffer for the data, a viewer (window), and the syntax highlighting component. For the view, there are a few handy functions already built in so you won't have to create them - undos, the syntax highlighting, line numbering, markers, and bracket highlighting.

On his blog today, Cocoliso talks about a handy bit of code to allow for syntax highlighting in your page - Geshi.

What if I told you that with as little as 3 lines of code, you could highlight code on your site? You'd jump at it, wouldn't you? Why not run with the big boys? Your users will love you for it and for good reason. It greatly increases readability.

He walks through the simple installation and how to use it in your page - complete with the code he uses to include the functionality in your page.