What the heck?!?! September 23, 2004
Posted by Aaron in : General, Play, Work , trackbackOk, so I’m tinkering away in PHP, working on OpenIT. I upload a change to the testing server and go to the affected page and php in its wonderfull crypticness said:
Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM, expecting ')' in /var/www/openit/inc/classes/SupportStatus.php on line 29
Now this may look like gobbly-gook to some of you, but those who’ve seen these errors are probably focusing on one thing in particular, T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM. If you’d been in the room with me when that popped up, you’d have heard a very clear, “what the….?!?!”
But google has saved me, for upon searching for T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM I found I wasn’t the only one to see this or say that. Go ahead sit down so you are ready for this…. Sitting? Well you had your chance. T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM is Hebrew (well ok, not the “T_” part). Let me repeat myself for those who are too stunned to process this, PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM is *Hebrew*, as in one of the languages you’d learn at a seminary. What it means roughly is, “Pair of colons”. Whoever wrote this section, rather than saying T_PAIR_OF_COLONS, decided to break out their mad hebrew skills (to be fair, english may not have been their first language) and confuse the heck out of us silly non-hebrew speakers. So dad, I may call you at some point with some translation requests, because next I’m expecting Greek or perhaps Aramaic. And to be honest, even this is greek to me.
Update:
I’m prepared now. The T_NEW error message in latin would roughly be T_NOVUS. Now I just need to figure out what the rest of them would be (oh and I wasn’t able to find a word for ‘colon’ in most of these languages unfortunatly)
Comments»
Nice post
We need to chat soon brother 
I am on my way to the hospital.. so hopefully we can catch up soon..
As a follow up, I’ve discovered more traces of the holy land in php.
Two functions for converting “logical Hebrew text to visual text”. Quite frankly I’ve no idea why you’d need to do that, but I guess thats cool.
[...] of my hits are from google, 11% from yahoo and 10% from msn. Most of you came looking for “t_paamayim_nekudotayim” still a lot of references to small annoying ra [...]
It happened to me to!
Hahahaha