[jablan]

> Other languages have some sort of warning suppression as well

But there is a huge difference here. PHP directly encourages it, making it so easy to do "just prefix it with @" and dedicating a part of the core language syntax to it (thus spending such a nice character for such a triviality). I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that in Java, it is just another annotation, and in C# just another preprocessor directive.

And I think that's what the article is about - so many things are wrong in the very foundation of the language.

[mbell]

In Java annotations can be used to ignore compiler warnings, not runtime errors.

To get the same effect as @ you'd have to use try {} catch {} blocks all over the place and leave the catch blocks empty, as with any other language with runtime exceptions. Sadly this is done more that one would think...

[jablan]

But that was exactly my point. When you do it in Java, you are obviously doing something wrong (or at least not intended to be done). It just looks wrong at the first glance, with empty blocks and all. In PHP, it's just a single character prefix, no bother at all to add, and looks just like any other sigil. Its usage is definitely not discouraged by design, quite the contrary.