Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Loosening heredoc/nowdoc scanner

On 30.08.2014 23:26, Robert Williams wrote:
> If the syntax of heredocs/nowdocs is to be loosened, the biggest aspect I’d like to see addressed is indentation. I can certainly see how it would be nice to loosen the restrictions around the post-closing-token newline to allow easier use in places like array definitions, but, I’ve never run into that problem myself. I have, however, been annoyed by the indentation limitations, so much so that I could probably count with my fingers the number of times that I’ve used the construct in the couple million lines of PHP I’ve written — even though I *want* to use it about once a week. I just find the side-effect on code formatting, when used in a container structure (class, function, method, loop, whatever), to be more than I can handle. Look at this simple example from the docs to see what I mean:
> 
> [...]
> 
> function foo() {
>    $string = <<<
>       THEEND
>       This is the document text. Any
>       whitespace appearing in a column
>       that’s before the starting token
>       is automatically ignored for all
>       lines.
>    THEEND;
> 

That is the only real problem with heredoc/nowdoc for me as well, not
the delimiter (and the reason why I hardly ever used it).

The problem is that I think this could be very confusing. It would be
the typical case of an additional optional argument to a function, but
it might be hard to implement it with an operator.

Greetings,
Florian