PHP's orthogonality

G

Guest

Guest
Hi,

I'm studying PHP as a Programming Language (I'm also a PHP programmer). I'm looking for stuff beyond the PHP's manual can offer, the main: (if possible a formal documentation)

The answer to this question: How is the PHP's orthogonality??

Definition of orthogonality: Possibility of combinining, without restrictions, the basic components of the language with itself.

Other topics are: reliability, simplicity. I've found docs about this.

Thanks in advance,
Ivan Zilotti Alencar.
 
give us some examples of another language that has a high orthagonality, and one that has a low orthagonality, that might help.
 
assuming this is the definition "few fundamental principles that may be combined without unneccessary restrictions"

from a syntactic view of scripting languages:

would perl have a low orthagonality, because it has so many equivelant syntactical ways of expressing the same action? ie more ways to do it than any one person usually knows about

would python have a high orthagonality because of it's enforced white-space based scoping? ie only one way to do it

would any scripting language that isn't compiled into assembly code be considered even basically orthogonal, since such a language is run through an interpreter written in another language, and as such derives it's structures from things completely different than then functionality the coder sees?

would php be considered more orthagonal because it's versions of arrays and hash tables are identical?
 
php does is not strongly typed. so from a coders perspective you could assume that there is only one type of varibale, a var variable, and php decided when it should be interpretted as an int or float.

does this make it more orthagonal?

so php has as basic items:

atomic variables
functions
arrays
objects


and objects are just collections of
functions
arrays
atomic variables


since it has so few does this make it more orthagonal?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top