Derick Rethans 0:17 Hi, I'm Derick, and this is PHP internals news, a weekly podcast dedicated to demystifying the development of the PHP language. This is Episode 57. Today I'm talking with Raluphl Schindler about an RFC that he's proposing titled "Conditional return break and continue statements". Hi Ralph, would you please introduce yourself.

Ralph Schindler 0:37 Hey, thanks for having me Derick. I am Ralph Schindler, just to give you a guess the 50,000 foot view of who I am. I've been doing PHP for 22 years now. Ever since the PHP three days, I worked in a number of companies in the industry. Before I broke out into the sort of knowing other PHP developers I was a solo practitioner. After that I went worked for three Comm. And that was kind of a big corporation after that I moved to Zend. I worked in the framework team at Zend and then after that, I worked for another company based out of Austin for friend of mine Josh Butts. That offers.com, we've been purchased since then by Ziff media. I'm still kind of in the corporate world. Ziff media owns some things you might have heard of, PC Magazine, Mashable, offers.com. The company that owns us owns is called j two they are j facts. They keep buying companies, so it's interesting I get to see a lot of different products and companies they get bought and they kind of get folded into the umbrella, and it's, it's an interesting place to work. I really enjoy it.

Derick Rethans 1:39 Very different from my non enterprise gigs

Ralph Schindler 1:43 Enterprise is such an abstract word, and, you know, it's kind of everybody's got different experiences with it.

Derick Rethans 1:49 Let's dive straight into this RFC that you're proposing. What is the problem that this RFC is trying to solve?

Ralph Schindler 1:54 This is actually kind of the bulk of what I want to talk about, because the actual implementation of it all is is extremely small. As it turns out it's kind of a heated and divided topic, My Twitter blew up last weekend after I tweeted it out, and some other people retweeted it so it's probably interesting. I really had to sit down and think about this one question you've got is what is it trying to solve. First and foremost, it's something I've wanted for a really long time, a couple years.

Two weekends ago I sat down and it was a Saturday and I'm like, you know what I haven't haven't hacked on the PHP source in such a long time. The last thing I did was the colon colon class thing, and I was like seven or eight years ago. And again, I got into that because I really wanted the challenge of like digging into the lexer and all that stuff and, incidentally, you know, I load PHP source in Xcode, and my workflow is: I like to set breakpoints in things, and I like to run something, and I look in the memory and I see what's going on and that's how I learned about things. And so I wanted to do that again. And this seemed like a small enough project where I could say, you know this is something I want to see in language, let me see if I can hack it out. First and foremost, I want this. And, you know, that's, it's a simple thing.

So what is it exactly is, it's basically at the statement level of PHP, it is a what they like to call a compound syntactic unit. Something that changes the statement in a way that I think probably facilitates more meaning and intent, and sometimes, not always, it'll do that and fewer lines of code. To kind of expand on that, this is a bit of a joke but a couple