[itafroma]

> Maybe there seem to be some alternatives?

This is not meant to be an endorsement of this method, but PHP <7.0 uses a single-pass compilation where the parser itself does the opcode compilation. A lot of the buggy and quirky behavior PHP exhibits (at least when that behavior is unintentional) is the result of this process.

Like a lot of extant PHP, there's no real reason it was done this way: it's just the method Rasmus et al happened to program the original engine, and it's grown organically since then. With the AST, phpng, and the uniform variable syntax, I'd argue PHP7's main feature is finally getting around to correcting the sins of the past.

[imakesnowflakes]

>A lot of the buggy and quirky behavior PHP exhibits (at least when that behavior is unintentional) is the result of this process.

A lot? Please stop spreading wrong info. In the words of an internal developer,

> It does fix a few minor points with regard to variables vs. expressions, but those aren't particularly important.

>"So, really, the whole thing has no direct effect on userland devs. It's an internal rewrite."

https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/2cc9xp/rfc_abstract_sy...

[itafroma]

> A lot? Please stop spreading wrong info. In the words of an internal developer,

You may disagree with me saying "a lot", and that's fair, but I don't think it's fair to say it's "wrong info" and NikiC's characterization that it has "no direct effect on userland devs" is disingenuous, given the RFC lists several changes to syntax and behavior: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/abstract_syntax_tree#changes_to_syn...