Code Improvement: Consider print instead of echo

[hakre]

There is a lot of echo in WP sourcecode. Instead of calling a function it is better use the intended language construct for doing output: print

Learn about print:
​http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.print.php

Compare to understand the differences to echo:
​http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.echo.php

Normally, echo calls should be easy to replace with print.

[hakre]

Let me know if you like to see a patch for this.

Somehow related: #13395

[filosofo]

Replying to hakre:

Instead of calling a function it is better use the intended language construct for doing output: print

Could you clarify your point? According to the PHP doc at your echo link:

echo() is not actually a function (it is a language construct), so you are not required to use parentheses with it. echo() (unlike some other language constructs) does not behave like a function

Also, I've read in several places over the years that echo is faster than print, although I haven't tested it myself. echo does seem to be the most common choice across a wide variety of PHP applications.

[hakre]

My fault, you're absolutely right. This went through my fingers, I thought I had checked for that.

Therefore #13395 / ​http://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/14647#file13 Change is pretty useless to replace echo with a function call containing echo only. But that only as sidenote here.

[nacin]

Replying to hakre:

Therefore #13395 / ​http://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/14647#file13 Change is pretty useless to replace echo with a function call containing echo only. But that only as sidenote here.

It's a shortcut for the however many thousand times we're translating strings. Not unlike __ instead of translate, _x instead of translate_with_context,_e instead of echo translate(), _n instead of ngettext, _nx instead of ngettext_with_context, etc.

[hakre]

Naturally I saw that, but that's not the point I wanted to make.

If it's for the shortcut (by typing, no processing wise), I've made ​another suggestion in the other ticket.

The problem I have with that (and what I wanted to say with my "pretty useless" comment) is that the introduction of new functions that do not provide new functionality are just useless.

Next to this that implementation has some overhead.

I can understand that you do not want to type much, but cryptic function names must not be seen as very helpful either.

But there are pros as well: Hackers, that now the project can save themselves some keys to type, and it can compress the code-size:

echo _x (7 bytes)

_ex (3 bytes), that's a 233% saving.