Triangular Phun

Photo on Flickr by Larkspur Studio

Some academic questions are simply too fun, i.e. phun in old-style PHP lingo, to shun. Mixing prime numbers with triangles may seem like a wacky idea, but once you’ve tried it, you may find yourself completely captivated.

PHP: Puzzling Over a Broken Line

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Did you ever encounter white space that just refused to budge?  I have and learned an important lesson.  Just as you ought not to judge a book by its cover, be careful when looking at code because sometimes you may mistakenly assume that what you see is what you get! Of course, to quote the Rollingstones:

You can’t always get what you want, 
But if you try sometime
You’ll find
You get what you need

PHP: byebye

 

If you think that this blogpost represents my swansong to PHP, know that I’ve been enamored of it since 1999, albeit nowadays a little less heady and more open-minded about competing technologies. The salutation entitling this blog post refers to an academic exercise, reminiscent of the fun  phun offered by fizbuzz.  In this case, the challenge involves  deriving the casual form “byebye” from “goodbye”. The impetus for this topic comes from an online discussion with respect to the C Programming Language (“C”), which caused me to ponder the merits of applying PHP for this purpose. 

PHP: The Unexpected Elseif …

Flickr: dominicspics

Recently,  a newbie posted a question online, inquiring about why  a white screen appeared instead of expected output when a PHP script executed.  Unfortunately, website “police” closed the question, and proffered a link suggesting  that the matter merely entailed setting up proper error reporting. If only such were the case! 

PHP: Something Borrowed, Something Blue

PHP first appeared more than two decades ago, becoming wildly popular as if it were some bright, new shiny toy to the delight of developers around the world. Enthusiasts proudly displayed the lovely soft blue logo on their sites. What may be less than apparent even after all these years pertains to the impact of Perl on PHP.  

JavaScript: And Then–Unexpectedly

Flickr: by michaelleckman

Imagine an array that purportedly contains only string values.

PHP and the Gem Within

Flickr: by Hetx

Ubiquitous and lithe, little characters, popping up anywhere from user-defined functions to control structures and class definitions, PHP’s curly braces depending on circumstances may exhibit a distinctly Perlish quality. Perl exerts an influence since it figures as one among three languages from which PHP, indelicately-speaking, purloins much of its syntax. PHP’s connection to Perl also relates to its predecessor PHP/FI, originally a Perl hack that Rasmus Lerdorf later rewrote in the C Programming Language. To better appreciate PHP, certainly its Perlish facet merits inspection, and complex (curly) syntax, lends itself well to this endeavor.

PHP: Converting Numbers into English

Flickr: By Maureen Barlin

Here’s a fun interview question for which you may wish to prepare. Create a PHP script to express integers ranging from 1-9999 in English.

PHP: Turning Bad Code into Good

You don’t have to write beautiful or elegant code in PHP. In fact, some would argue that PHP would never win a beauty contest. Yet, one might argue that beauty is a marker for health, so beautiful, elegant code may indicate something about how robust the code is.

PHP: (Ab)using the For-Loop

Flickr:  by mald

This blogpost draws inspiration from a similar one exploring ways to use or abuse loops in the C Programming Language

A Recursive Exercise in C

By Photo: RK812, Doll carved by Zvezdochkin, painted by Malyutin

Recently someone asked an interesting question at StackOverflow about using recursion  in the C Programming Language to achieve the same result as code relying on a loop structure.  The question pertained to outputting a geometric pattern.

PHP: Dynamically Transforming a String

Flickr: by Gnu200

Some people may be less than enamored of academic computer programming questions, preferring instead

Practical PHP vs Academic JavaScript

Flickr: by redvers

 

The following represent two questions that I came across at another site

The Travails of Traversal

Flickr: By JacobDavis

The venerated foreach-loop may seem to have formed a part of PHP from the outset, but it actually entered the language starting with PHP 4, apparently appropriated from Perl. While nowadays, this control structure provides a convenient way to iterate over an array or object without the complication of conditional looping inherent in for, while, and do-while loops, it was originally intended to provide a way to easily traverse arrays (see PHP Manual published 3-6-2003).

Reaching for the Stars

Flickr: by Oblong

In 2014, Davey Shafik, author of the Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide, presented a proposal to the PHP Internals List recommending the addition of yet another operator, the spaceship. While the operator’s name may connote PHP blasting off, its down-to-earth function scarcely relates to outer space.

The Erroneous Basis of base_convert()

July (Photo credit: kurafire)

Some bugs linger from one version of PHP to the next, such as the one associated with base_convert() and other base conversion functions. It has existed at least since the long, gone days of PHP 4. It even managed to escape the notice of Eevee in his encyclopedic rant railing against PHP a few years ago. An understandable oversight, given that nowadays developers usually apply themselves to other endeavors than converting values from one base to another.

PHP: Classy Dynamics

flickr: by JusDaFax

Devotees of PHP may worry with the debut of PHP 7 that users have lost the beloved language we’ve known over the past twenty years. In truth, the newest version generally conforms to previous ones. In fact, the advent of PHP 7 heralds a technology distinguished by greater flexibility and consistency.

Modulating the Modulo

 

A recent article contrasting PHP with Ruby, denigrates making comparisons of one language with others, dismissing such efforts as worthless save for being a clickbait strategy. Yet, sometimes the best way to understand the familiar requires venturing out and exploring something new. If one only knows PHP, a developer may still write quality code. But, learning about C, JavaScript and Python, all of which have influenced PHP, may enhance one’s appreciation for its nuances.And, let’s not forget the other “P” in the pod, Perl, which had a pivotal bearing on PHP’s early development. Speaking of Perl, its creator Larry Wall drew inspiration from UNIX. Of particular interest, that operating system’s (OS) Bourne Shell has an open-sourced cousin bash (the “Bourne Again Shell”), knowledge of which may also enhance one’s appreciation for PHP.

The Power behind the Throne

flickr: from British library

 

While looking forward to the upcoming official release of the latest incarnation of PHP, namely PHP7 (slated for November 12th), spending a moment or two reviewing such basics as the expression statement should enhance one’s appreciation for PHP and how this powerful feature contributes to its feasibility, permitting it to reign more than two decades.

The Real Error

flickr: by Poulepondeuse

Sometimes a PHP script may produce an inconsistent type of error, i.e. in one version of PHP a less serious parse error displays while in another version a fatal error message appears. 

PHP BOF SCALE 13x

Food for Thought:

Links for Best in Show

flickr: by by Bryn Pinzgauer

The following links represent some of the resources I consulted for my talk “Best in Show”

SCALE13x

Sleight of Date

Flickr: by Paolo Margari

Someone posted an interesting JavaScript question recently at StackOverflow, concerning how one may  convert a date string into Unix time without the timezone effecting the result. In reflecting on that question, I also discovered a “trick” by which one can fool a local date object to a degree.

Hello, Again!

Flickr: by rdohms

I chanced upon some amusing JAVA code today and decided to translate it into PHP. Here’s the code:

PHP: Going to Zero

Flickr: by djniks

Following in the tradition of its predecessor Perl, PHP has its own secret operators (see “Inchworm on a Stick“).Today let’s explore the heretofore unknown PHP operator, “-–>”, most remarkable for quickly reducing a numerical value to zero.  At first sight, one might mistake this symbol for PHP’s arrow operator designed to access an object’s properties and methods, until one realizes that two hyphens instead of one distinguish this arrow.  So, why have we yet to hear about this new operator? What is its name and why does the operator precedence table (see Manual) neglect to include it?

Let Me Count The Ways …

Flickr: by Dom Dada

Elizabeth Barrett Browning pondered affairs of the heart when she penned her famous love poem, a fragment of which entitles this piece as an acknowledgment of PHP’s characteristic TIMTOWTDI (“there is more than one way to do it”) approach, particularly prevalent in displaying data.

One of the earliest ways to do output involved PHP utilizing an echo command written in C for the express purpose of

A Lasting List Fix?

Flickr: by Burstyriffic

One of PHP’s most convenient constructs is

Flattening a Multidimensional Array

Image via Wikipedia

 

To meet the challenge of flattening a multidimensional array, one should consider

Illuminating a Dark Alley

Flickr: by I.Gouss

 

“PHP has its share of dark alleys that you really don’t want to find yourself inside.   Object properties with names that are numbers is one of them…”

Jon,  StackOverflow

 

Object properties with integers for names are illegal in PHP.  Yet,

One Way or Another!

flickr: by Wiertz Sébastien

 

I recently dusted off an old tome among my PHP books,

Links 4 Surprise! It’s PHP :)

Flickr: by Philerooski

A few notable links from my latest talk

Constant Consistency

Flickr: by better_days.geo

For some time PHP has had the ability to create constant expressions with define().

Exploring the Question of Embedded Java in PHP

flickr: by Mangiwau

Today, I discovered a curious tweet by Volker Dusch that may cause one to consider the wild possibility of embedding Java in PHP.

Taking Stock of the Stack in PHP

flickr: by cvfyne

Introduction

You may have heard about ‘the stack’ or call stack, part of a computer’s random access memory (RAM), wherein a function, including its parameters and return value, reside temporarily. One retrieves them on the basis of FILO (First In, Last Out), synonymous with LIFO (Last In, First Out). Users of high-level languages like C and PHP are much less likely to directly handle this stack.

Post Script on POW

Flickr: by Anders Sandberg (Arenamontanus)

The new pow operator ** has needed a little tweaking and at the same time we may need to rethink the usefulness of the pow().  

Networking Trivia

flickr: by estebanvillano

In today’s post, I’d like to share some basic networking minutiae mostly from a Linux perspective as if it were a quiz. But, I’ll do one better, and share the results of all my Goog-ooling.

PHP Curiosities

Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning.
William Arthur Ward
Flickr: Photo by cirruspop 

This is the resource listing used for the talk entitled “PHP Curiosities” presented first at SCALE PHP BOF, February 22, 2014.

Taming the Wild West of PHP

Flickr: by Moyan_Brenn

In a previous posting, I briefly mentioned something bizarre that happened this past December 2013.  

Inching Along Through PHP

Geometer Moth, Geometridae (Photo credit: Andreas Kay)

It begins its life journey first as larva.  Later, a metamorphosis occurs,

PHP on the Cusp of a New Operator

Flickr: by yh828

For nearly two decades, if you include precursor PHP/FI, PHP lacked a basic mathematical operator, the one for exponentiation.

Magic, Sugar & Lipstick – Resources

by hohcdc

This is the resource listing used for the 2013 talk entitled “Magic, Sugar & Lipstick”.