Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm pretty sure that historically shell is the common influence of PHP, Perl, and Tcl.

PHP also inherits shell's here doc syntax, e.g. <<EOF . Not sure if Perl has that.

Actually PHP started out as a bunch of cgi-bin scripts, if I recall. It was very much "a shell for the web".

It kind of annoys me that they all require $ on the left, whereas shell only requires it on the right, which somehow makes more sense to me, e.g.

    a=$b  # shell

    $a = $b  # PHP and I think Perl

> It kind of annoys me that they all require $ on the left, whereas shell only requires it on the right

Interesting - it makes it look like Bash uses $ to “read” from the variable, while in PHP/Perl $ only indicates that the rest of the symbol _is_ a variable.

>>PHP also inherits shell's here doc syntax, e.g. <<EOF . Not sure if Perl has that.

It does.

>>It kind of annoys me that they all require $ on the left

Larry Wall says he went that direction to make namespace clashing between $dog, @dog, %dog, and "sub dog {}" (scalar, array, hashtable, function) a non-issue.

http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html ("Disambiguation")

Reply on news.ycombinator.com