Home / 2007 / July

Unicode math symbols as operators in PHP6?

PHP

Noted over on Sara Golemon’s blog today. Can we expect this sort of thing to be in future PHP code?

var_dump(¼, ½ ¾);
// float(0.25)
// float(0.5)
// float(0.75)

var_dump(1 ≤ 2, 2 ≯ 3, 5 ≠ 6);
// bool(true)
// bool(true)
// bool(true)

var_dump(3 × 4, 15 ÷ 5);
// int(12)
// int(3)

var_dump(1 « 3);
// int(8)

/* Your font may be too small,
 * but that's a skull and crossbones */
☠('aka die/exit');

Well, no, not really – she implemented it just for fun, but it’s an interesting idea, and face it – who doesn’t want to be able to use all the keys on the Space Cadet Keyboard?

Space Kadet keyboard… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in No Comments

OSCON

General

Sometimes you really do feel like you’re missing out by not going to events like this 😀

And sod it, Michael Schwern’s talk about improving as a programmer definitely sounded interesting.

Oh well. There’s always next year, and downloading slides and reading the blog entries and watching the videos on youtube…. but they’re just not the same really.… Read the rest

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Mechanism, not Policy

MySQLPostgres

Over on Diamond Notes, a somewhat skeptical take on the recent Postgres benchmarks news. Can’t say I agree with it, and I did comment on it, but something did go click for me while thinking about it, hence this entry. See, the problem isn’t just performance. MySQL just doesn’t do the right thing.

I mean, I can understand the principle of implementing the smallest featureset you think a user would need and then optimising the bejaysus out of it – Epiphany would be a better browser than Firefox for 90% of the time for me because of that approach (it’s just Epiphany’s way of doing bookmarks that gets in the way) because Epiphany is always faster and less of a memory hog than Firefox since it doesn’t try to do everything.… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 5 Comments