PHP has finally ushered in its own formal language specification

As a scripting language, PHP has been playing a key role in the Web development field. now it has begun to make efforts in terms of semantics and syntax to reduce differences ......

As a scripting language, PHP has been playing a key role in the Web development field, and now it is beginning to make efforts in terms of semantics and syntax to reduce differences.

Although PHP scripting language was born around 1995 and plays an important role in the Web development field, it has never had its own formal language specifications-it only provides a wide range of user instructions. However, this kind of disadvantage is turning around.

Led by Facebook, a draft specification has been published on GitHub to provide a complete set of definitions of PHP language semantics and syntax.

"The next major version of PHP, namely PHP 7, is under development. to make sure it is completely consistent with the existing PHP script, the most important thing is to understand all the usage expectations of this engine, "Sara Golemon, Facebook's company responsible for the standard development, said. "In addition, due to the introduction of HHVM and other alternative implementation aspects, we will keep all kinds of different situations to a minimum and also be considered as the focus, this also requires us to have a deep understanding of the features required by a well-functioning magnetic engine."

The PHP team, including Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of the PHP language, and Andi Gutmans, CEO of Zend Technologies, a tool supplier, is responsible for supervising standardized R & D. A change to this specification requires that the participant have a php.net account.

The HHVM project named HipHop Virtual Machine was created by Facebook to make PHP code run faster. The specifications in this plan will ensure that HHVM is an implementation solution that exactly matches PHP, Golemon explained. "For example, the consistency suite we released in the specification shows the number of failures that HHVM encountered in edge conditions. With this information, we can make HHVM more closely integrated with PHP ."

The next step for standardized development is to improve the expression, correct the edge conditions, and strengthen the consistency suite. "In the long run, this document will take the same development steps as the PHP implementation solution to provide document records for the new syntax in a formal way, for example, pow operators, variadics, and splat recently appeared, "Golemon pointed out.

Developers using this language have been committed to improving the performance of their applications in real-world environments. In the lab, these changes have reduced the number of device commands required for application execution and memory usage.

Portal (GitHub ):

Https://github.com/php/php-langs... c/php-spec-draft.md

Link to the original article: Php Gets its Own Formal Language Specification