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Deprecate short_open_tag ini directive?

php.internals

Girgias

7 years ago

Hello internals,

I'm currently going through the PHP doc to remove mentions of PHP 4
and stumbled upon the short_open_tag ini directive [1] which only affects
the availability of `<?` tags as `<?=`is always available as of PHP 5.4.
From my understanding, the `<?` tag is not available without the directive,
so maybe we should deprecate PHP's short tag altogether?

Best regards

George P. Banyard

[1] https://secure.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.short-open-tag

Rowan Collins

7 years ago

On Mon, 11 Mar 2019 at 20:06, G. P. B. <george.banyard@gmail.com> wrote:

> From my understanding, the `<?` tag is not available without the directive,
> so maybe we should deprecate PHP's short tag altogether?
>

I think when that's been proposed in the past, people have said they like
it for use in simple templates, often along with the "alternative control
structures", e.g.:

<? foreach ( $things as $thing ): ?>
<? if ( $thing->quantity > 1 ): ?><p><?= $thing->description; ?></p><?
endif; ?>
<? endforeach; ?>

I couldn't find any discussions for a few years, though, so it's possible
opinions have changed.

Regards,

--
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]

Peter Kokot

7 years ago

Hello,
On Tue, 12 Mar 2019 at 10:51, Rowan Collins <rowan.collins@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> On Mon, 11 Mar 2019 at 20:06, G. P. B. <george.banyard@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > From my understanding, the `<?` tag is not available without the directive,
> > so maybe we should deprecate PHP's short tag altogether?
> >
>
>
> I think when that's been proposed in the past, people have said they like
> it for use in simple templates, often along with the "alternative control
> structures", e.g.:
>
> <? foreach ( $things as $thing ): ?>
> <? if ( $thing->quantity > 1 ): ?><p><?= $thing->description; ?></p><?
> endif; ?>
> <? endforeach; ?>
>
> I couldn't find any discussions for a few years, though, so it's possible
> opinions have changed.
>
> Regards,
> --
> Rowan Collins
> [IMSoP]

PHP based template engines today most likely use only <?php and <?=
because of this topic today exactly. Possibility of being deprecated
:) I think the short opening tags are good to go so things are more
simple.

A side question is there any plan to move the idea of removing opening
<?php tag for PHP only files or is this off topic here? PHP has long
moved out of the template engines world and left that task to more
dedicated so called compiled or parsed template engines (such as Twig
or Blade), so maybe something to think about as well.

--
Peter Kokot

Rowan Collins

7 years ago

On Tue, 12 Mar 2019 at 10:12, Peter Kokot <peterkokot@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> PHP based template engines today most likely use only <?php and <?=
> because of this topic today exactly. Possibility of being deprecated
> :) I think the short opening tags are good to go so things are more
> simple.
>

A quick search of the list archives showed the opposite: reassurances that
short open tags are *not* deprecated, and vocal support for keeping them.

> A side question is there any plan to move the idea of removing opening
> <?php tag for PHP only files or is this off topic here? PHP has long
> moved out of the template engines world and left that task to more
> dedicated so called compiled or parsed template engines (such as Twig
> or Blade), so maybe something to think about as well.
>

I think that's a different discussion - and also one that's happened a few
times in the past. I think the general conclusion was that the gain isn't
big enough to bother changing every tool that works with PHP.

Regards,

--
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]

Alexandru Pătrănescu

7 years ago

Hi,

I guess that `short_open_tag` ini settings can be deprecated/removed.
But that would mean that short open tags will be always available, not that
it will be removed.

Regards,
Alex

On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 12:39 PM Rowan Collins <rowan.collins@gmail.com>
wrote:

Peter Kokot

7 years ago

On Tue, 12 Mar 2019 at 12:15, Alexandru Pătrănescu <drealecs@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> I guess that `short_open_tag` ini settings can be deprecated/removed.
> But that would mean that short open tags will be always available, not that
> it will be removed.
>
> Regards,
> Alex

Oh, the main idea is to remove the ini directive which will make the
short tags by default then on? So the currently not enabled short tags
will be again enabled by default?

From what I understand here, probably deprecation is referring also to
the short tags themselves in favour of the <?php tag only.

--
Peter Kokot

Girgias

7 years ago

I was more going along the lines of removing short tags altogether with the
ini setting as they are not available out of the box except if you use a
special compile flag. However, I didn't know they were used with template
engines but wouldn't they just use `<?=` which is always available?
I mean I don't really have any strong opinions about it. It just seems a
bit odd considering we removed ASP tags in, IIRC, PHP 7.

Best regards

George P. Banyard

Christoph Becker

7 years ago

On 12.03.2019 at 14:27, G. P. B. wrote:

> I was more going along the lines of removing short tags altogether with the
> ini setting as they are not available out of the box except if you use a
> special compile flag.

To my knowledge, short_open_tag=1 *always* enables short open tags,
regardless of the configure option --disable-short-tags or others.

--
Christoph M. Becker

Girgias

7 years ago

On Tue, 12 Mar 2019 at 14:43, Christoph M. Becker <cmbecker69@gmx.de> wrote:

> On 12.03.2019 at 14:27, G. P. B. wrote:
>
> > I was more going along the lines of removing short tags altogether with
> the
> > ini setting as they are not available out of the box except if you use a
> > special compile flag.
>
> To my knowledge, short_open_tag=1 *always* enables short open tags,
> regardless of the configure option --disable-short-tags or others.
>
> --
> Christoph M. Becker
>

I really need to get better at articulating what I mean.
From what I know this is the case but when I meant out of the box I
meant without using the ini configuration.
So it is possible to use it if you declare the INI config.
However it may clash with XML from my understanding of the doc.


Best Regards

George P. Banyard

Rowan Collins

7 years ago

On Tue, 12 Mar 2019 at 13:28, G. P. B. <george.banyard@gmail.com> wrote:

> I was more going along the lines of removing short tags altogether with the
> ini setting as they are not available out of the box except if you use a
> special compile flag.
>

I don't really follow this reasoning: if we removed every feature which
wasn't enabled out of the box, we wouldn't need an INI file at all.

The question has to be whether including the option to turn this on is
still useful to people.

> However, I didn't know they were used with template
> engines but wouldn't they just use `<?=` which is always available?
>

No, as shown in my previous example, I've seen people use short-tags for
logic, like <? if($foo): ?>  some HTML <? endif; ?>

> I mean I don't really have any strong opinions about it. It just seems a
> bit odd considering we removed ASP tags in, IIRC, PHP 7.
>

ASP tags were removed because they were very rarely used, and most people
probably didn't even know they existed. Short tags, in contrast, are
actually *older* than the full "<?php" tag, and were at one time extremely
common.

Again, it's possible that in the years since this was last discussed that
their usage has declined, but as with so many existing features, it's hard
to know who is still relying on it, particularly in private code, so we
should be very cautious of "just tidying up".

Regards,

--
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]

Johannes Schlueter

7 years ago

On Di, 2019-03-12 at 15:53 +0000, Rowan Collins wrote:

> On Tue, 12 Mar 2019 at 13:28, G. P. B. <george.banyard@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >
> > I was more going along the lines of removing short tags altogether
> > with the
> > ini setting as they are not available out of the box except if you
> > use a
> > special compile flag.
> >
>
> I don't really follow this reasoning: if we removed every feature
> which wasn't enabled out of the box, we wouldn't need an INI file at
> all.

Which would be good - as all those things make writing portable code
harder.

   $ echo '<?xml ?>' | php

Is a valid program, which will behave vastly different based on the ini
setting.

Of course for some things having a config is good (error levels
arguably, extension loading, ...) but for the raw language syntax and
behavior not so.

johannes

Peter Kokot

7 years ago

Hello,

On Tue, 12 Mar 2019 at 17:57, Johannes Schlüter <johannes@schlueters.de> wrote:

>
> On Di, 2019-03-12 at 15:53 +0000, Rowan Collins wrote:
> > On Tue, 12 Mar 2019 at 13:28, G. P. B. <george.banyard@gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > I was more going along the lines of removing short tags altogether
> > > with the
> > > ini setting as they are not available out of the box except if you
> > > use a
> > > special compile flag.
> > >
> >
> > I don't really follow this reasoning: if we removed every feature
> > which wasn't enabled out of the box, we wouldn't need an INI file at
> > all.
>
> Which would be good - as all those things make writing portable code
> harder.
>
>    $ echo '<?xml ?>' | php
>
> Is a valid program, which will behave vastly different based on the ini
> setting.
>
> Of course for some things having a config is good (error levels
> arguably, extension loading, ...) but for the raw language syntax and
> behavior not so.
>
> johannes
>
> --
> PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List
> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
>

In reality if developer wants to write "portable" and proper PHP code,
no one actually should use these short tags anymore. If they are still
used somewhere as part of some legacy code, they won't work on
majority of PHP installations anymore because the mostly have these
turned off today in the php.ini files. So, the question here is more
why supporting a feature that no one should use anymore...

--
Peter Kokot

Rasmus Schultz

7 years ago

For the record, we're a mid-size organization, building a modern product on
PHP 7 with a PSR-based stack.

We've shunned template engines and rely heavily on short open tags and
alternative control-structures - mainly because we insist on static
analysis and IDE support, which we get by manually type-hinting a single
view-model variable $view at the beginning of each template.

No other template engine gives us what we want in terms of static analysis,
type-checking or IDE support.

The choice to rebuild a very large product in PHP vs e.g. Node, at the
time, was in part motivated by PHP's template features - which, while it
may look pretty verbose and ugly on the surface, has a huge advantage over
basically anything else, e.g. static analysis with various QA tools,
automated refactorings (rename etc.) in PHP Storm, and so on.

The loss of this feature would be a substantial setback for our
organization - for which there is no really good replacement.


On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 10:51 AM Rowan Collins <rowan.collins@gmail.com>
wrote:

Stas Malyshev

7 years ago

Hi!

> I'm currently going through the PHP doc to remove mentions of PHP 4
> and stumbled upon the short_open_tag ini directive [1] which only affects
> the availability of `<?` tags as `<?=`is always available as of PHP 5.4.
> From my understanding, the `<?` tag is not available without the directive,
> so maybe we should deprecate PHP's short tag altogether?

Why? What would it improve for people that are using it? For people that
aren't, it obviously won't change anything. So what would be the
motivation for this change?

--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev@gmail.com

Sara Golemon

7 years ago

On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 11:57 AM Stanislav Malyshev <smalyshev@gmail.com>
wrote:

> > I'm currently going through the PHP doc to remove mentions of PHP 4
> > and stumbled upon the short_open_tag ini directive [1] which only

affects

> > the availability of `<?` tags as `<?=`is always available as of PHP 5.4.
> > From my understanding, the `<?` tag is not available without the

directive,

> > so maybe we should deprecate PHP's short tag altogether?
>
> Why? What would it improve for people that are using it? For people that
> aren't, it obviously won't change anything. So what would be the
> motivation for this change?
>

I'm with Stas (and some others in disconnected sub-threads because email is
hard).  This RFC needs a better "why this is important" section.  Yeah, I
get that it being an option makes writing portable code harder, I get that
the XML open tag is something that can be tripped on, but why is removing
it a sufficiently better solution to the "problem"?

As we stand now, code using short open tags works when those tags are
enabled.  As we'd stand in the future, that code would not work.  That
level of BC break requires a strong justification.

-Sara

Johannes Schlueter

7 years ago

On Mo, 2019-03-25 at 09:38 -0500, Sara Golemon wrote:

>
> As we stand now, code using short open tags works when those tags are
> enabled.  As we'd stand in the future, that code would not work. 
> That
> level of BC break requires a strong justification.

The code would not simply "not work" but even potentially leak to the
client (as PHP would not treat it as code) which could leak credentials
or other sensitive information.

I still think that long-term goal should be that language behavior
doesn't depend on ini configuration. 

Also creating a tool which does the conversion is relatively simple.

johannes

Andrey Andreev

7 years ago

Hi,

On Mon, Mar 25, 2019 at 5:16 PM Johannes Schlüter
<johannes@schlueters.de> wrote:

>
> On Mo, 2019-03-25 at 09:38 -0500, Sara Golemon wrote:
> >
> > As we stand now, code using short open tags works when those tags are
> > enabled.  As we'd stand in the future, that code would not work.
> > That
> > level of BC break requires a strong justification.
>
> The code would not simply "not work" but even potentially leak to the
> client (as PHP would not treat it as code) which could leak credentials
> or other sensitive information.
>
> I still think that long-term goal should be that language behavior
> doesn't depend on ini configuration.
>

OK, so why not flip it and make it always available instead? I'm aware
of the potential XML conflict, but I've personally never seen it, so
to me that looks like the lesser evil compared to a massive BC break.

Cheers,
Andrey.

Michael Wallner

7 years ago

On 25/03/2019 16:38, Andrey Andreev wrote:

>
> OK, so why not flip it and make it always available instead? I'm aware
> of the potential XML conflict, but I've personally never seen it, so
> to me that looks like the lesser evil compared to a massive BC break.

I slightly lean towards removing support for '<?', but in contrast, I've
seen `echo '<?xml'` quite a lot due to fear of short_open_tags.

--
Regards,
Mike

Kenneth Ellis McCall

7 years ago

G. P. B. wrote:

> currently going through the PHP doc to remove mentions of PHP 4
> and stumbled upon the short_open_tag ini directive [1] which only affects
> the availability of `<?` tags as `<?=`is always available as of PHP 5.4.
>  From my understanding, the `<?` tag is not available without the directive,
> so maybe we should deprecate PHP's short tag altogether?

I would like to see that. "Question mark equals what?".

If you want to go further, dropping the PHP tag altogether would be
nice, since it would prevent context switching between
PHP/HTML/JS/whatever. That would force Wordpress to update their whole
code base. >:{)>

Morgan Breden

7 years ago

>If you want to go further, dropping the PHP tag altogether would be nice,

since it would prevent context switching between PHP/HTML/JS/whatever.

>That would force Wordpress to update their whole

code base. >:{)>

I wholeheartedly support this initiative but I do not see it going through
without a lot of resistance. Using PHP itself as a templating engine is
part of what makes it so "newbie friendly".

Peter Kokot

7 years ago

Hello,
On Sat, 16 Mar 2019 at 03:57, Morgan Breden <morganbreden@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> >If you want to go further, dropping the PHP tag altogether would be nice,
> since it would prevent context switching between PHP/HTML/JS/whatever.
> >That would force Wordpress to update their whole
> code base. >:{)>
>
> I wholeheartedly support this initiative but I do not see it going through
> without a lot of resistance. Using PHP itself as a templating engine is
> part of what makes it so "newbie friendly".

I think using PHP tags for templates and option to write code without
opening tag might go through also. After all, text files are simple.

Something on this was already being done and probably also discussed:
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/nophptags

On the other hand, shebangs will still be present in CLI scripts. For example:
#!/usr/bin/env php

--
Peter Kokot

Girgias

7 years ago

On Sat, 16 Mar 2019 at 03:44, Kenneth Ellis McCall <xellisx@gmail.com>
wrote:

> G. P. B. wrote:
> > currently going through the PHP doc to remove mentions of PHP 4
> > and stumbled upon the short_open_tag ini directive [1] which only affects
> > the availability of `<?` tags as `<?=`is always available as of PHP 5.4.
> >  From my understanding, the `<?` tag is not available without the
> directive,
> > so maybe we should deprecate PHP's short tag altogether?
>
> I would like to see that. "Question mark equals what?".
>
> If you want to go further, dropping the PHP tag altogether would be
> nice, since it would prevent context switching between
> PHP/HTML/JS/whatever. That would force Wordpress to update their whole
> code base. >:{)>

As I don't know how to email I already sent a private response which
basically states
that the `<?=` is equivalent to `<?php echo` as shown on the note on the
ini setting:
https://secure.php.net/manual/en/ini.core.php#ini.short-open-tag
(thinking of it this feature maybe could be better documented)

Also I could write an RFC for the deprecation as it is controversial but as
I said
before I would need someone to grant me RFC karma to my PHP.net account
girgias

Best regards

George P. Banyard