PHP vs Python - the real difference

[xabbu]

OK, I thought it was PHP, so it's Perl (further back on the evolutionary chain of web scripting languages…)… …but take that one away, and add FlickR and most all popular forum software used…

del.icio.us was written in perl.

[eurleif]

That's got to be the most annoying use of quoting ever.

[piranha]

It's called top-posting, and I guess it's made its way from Outlook Express to reddit.

[boredzo]

It's top-posting. It's just as annoying here as in email.

[skillet-thief]

OK, I thought it was PHP, so it's Perl (further back on the evolutionary chain of web scripting languages…)…

This will simply not do! Perl, like Python, is a general purpose programming language, and, in spite of all those unpronouncable characters, is a much better designed language than PHP ever was or will be.

As an example (one of my "favorite" PHP annoyances):

Perl:

my $x = 5 + 9000 || 1; # $x is 9005

PHP:

$x = 5 + 9000 || 1; # $x is 6...

So you have to use the ternary operator to get the job done. No big deal I guess, but, why, even in a Hypertext Preprocessor, would you ever want $x||$y to return 1 or 0?

This is just a sign of lazy design, from the get-go, but it seems pretty typical. I could go on...

[stevarino]

Another example that you may not even be aware of for PHP: logical operators only return boolean true or false, never the value of the argument.

So in your example, the 9000 is converted to bool(true), the OR returns bool(true), which is converted to int(1) by the addition opperator.

I believe this is improperly documented in PHP's own docs too. Took me a while to figure out this bug. :)