Never forget your semicolons

I’ve been working on a PHP script this weekend and it’s my first time writing PHP with a program that is actually designed for writing code (I’ve been using Wordpad and Notepad entirely until now). It’s also my first time doing serious work with functions and revisiting a lot of the coding that I did in 1st and 2nd level Java programming.

For one thing, half my errors have been forgetting to put semicolons at the end of a statement. It’s such a noobish mistake, worse than forgetting to close html tags or css blocks. It always tends to happen when I use echo… maybe because PHP is so simple that I get careless. At least I’ve learned to recognize when an error is due to forgetting a semicolon. And now that I’m using a nice editor, it doesn’t take me years of hitting the down-arrow to find the line it’s on.

Another thing I’ve found is that PHP doesn’t support re-declaring a method with a new number of arguments. I forgot what this is called, I was always able to do it in Java, but with PHP I just can’t do:

foo () { do something...; }
foo ($arg) { do something different with this argument; }
foo ($arg1, $arg2) { $arg3 = $arg1 + $arg2; foo($arg3); }

That was rather surprising, and it illustrates some of the shortcomings of PHP that I’ve read about. I had to do something along the lines of:

foo () { do something...; }
footwo ($arg) { …; }
foothree ($arg1, $arg2) { …; …; }

Not so cool, since it’s harder to keep track of all those functions. Come to think of it, does anyone remember the name of the technique? Something like “overriding methods.”