@ Nathan:

Thanks, I shamelessly stole that idea from Joel Spolsky, but I will gladly take credit for it. :)

Great post! I look forward to part 2.
Prefixing unsafe variables with ‘U’ and safe ones with ‘S’ is a great idea. Will start doing this.

@ Jason *StDoodle* Wood:

Fuck it, I’m calling my new sofware GNU is Not HURD. ;)

Does recursive acronym + doubly recursive acronym = triple recursive acronym?

Well, IIRC the first “P” stands for PHP. Apparently, recursive acronyms are a thing. Personally, I think they’re about as “neat” as fart jokes, but to each their own…

@ Chris Wellons:

Wow, very nice. I like how succinct it is. :)

And yes, it is probably smart to stay away from PHP. I think it is very telling that its very name is about as messy and idiosyncratic and nonsensical as some of it’s constructs.

What does PHP stand for?
– HTML Preprocessor

Yeah, I don’t know how they got that either either. Still, I do have a strange fondness for the language.

This sounds like a fun series! However, I’ve never used PHP and I intend to avoid it until it’s dead, so I made my own in Elisp. I’ll probably follow along with your series. This is the initial quick and dirty version.

https://gist.github.com/4324599/bda3aef96235891bd4f78f3ab0f5847b884c25 d5

Here’s an example paste in action (which I’ll keep hosted here for a week or so):

http://zeus.nullprogram.com/pastebin/1191fd7b