2016-02-02



I like a lot that the PHP documentation is so readily  accessible
online: php.net/foo. This is just like accessing man pages. Every
system a programmer works with should have its documentation  ac-
cessible so directly.

But the quality of the PHP docs is much lower than the quality of
most  man  pages.  Take  this one, which demonstrates well what I
mean: http://php.net/fileperms

     // Owner
     $info .= (($perms & 0x0100) ? 'r' : '-');
     $info .= (($perms & 0x0080) ? 'w' : '-');
     $info .= (($perms & 0x0040) ?
                 (($perms & 0x0800) ? 's' : 'x' ) :
                 (($perms & 0x0800) ? 'S' : '-'));

Using hex to calculate bits in Unix file permissions, is a  clear
indication that the author of this example has not understood the
concept of the permission storage in Unix.

Compare it to this version in octal:

     // Owner
     $info .= (($perms & 00400) ? 'r' : '-');
     $info .= (($perms & 00200) ? 'w' : '-');
     $info .= (($perms & 00100) ?
                 (($perms & 04000) ? 's' : 'x' ) :
                 (($perms & 04000) ? 'S' : '-'));

Looks much clearer and more sensible this way, doesn't it?



http://marmaro.de/lue/        markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>