The Adventures of Emacs the Viking

This is another article in my attempts to find new ways of looking at PHP and making it less of a chore to type in all that code. As much as I love PHP I hate wasting keystrokes. More typing is more errors is more grief. Being an off and on user of Lisp, although not as much as I used to, one of the things that I always liked in Lisp was the ability to be able to return multiple values from a function at once using (values) and then marry that with (multiple-value-bind) to create convenient named bindings for whatever you were about to do. I recently found myself wanting to return a couple of values from a helper function and I just didn't want to go to the trouble of having to type all those character required to create an array with keys for the two values and then I remembered MVB and a little light went on in my head! If somebody else has already done this then I apologise up front but it was new to me and I haven't seen it anywhere else so this could be a first!

I decided recently, while starting a new project, that it would be interesting to try and take some of my new found paradigms from Haskell back into the relative slums of PHP. As much as I like the fact that PHP just works, the more I get into Haskell the more I resent having to type reams and reams of code in PHP just to get things done. That's just me and I won't change! One of the things that I am really starting to miss now that I understand Monads (at least enough to write them and use them, my own and the libraries) is the ability to be able to have "Maybe". It is such a lovely way of handling data when there really isn't anything and it sure as hell kicks ass over using "NULL" as a return type. PHP is riddled with functions that return FALSE to mean they didn't actually work or some other value if they did which makes a whole mockery of its so called "types". Case in point, when using PDO for example (I could be wrong but I do

I recently had the task of learning how to implement our internal company PHP coding standards documents which exist only as a set of JIRA pages into something that could be integrated into the subversion pre-commit checking phase so that not only does code have to be syntax error free, it now also has to adhere to the coding standards. I remembered reading about PHP_CodeSniffer (PCS) and volunteered to "have a look" and see if I could implement one of the more simpler standards, our variable naming convention, as a starter exercise. Well, after the mandatory head-banging and spike in coffee consumption that accompanies learning new stuff, I became very impressed by the way that PCS actually does what it does. It builds upon the token_get_all()   function and creates not just an array of tokens and there positions but it also figures out (I read the source for half an hour!) which bits of code are contained within other bits of code; in other words the context within which