I would have to agree that the beatings are unnecessary, and I wouldn’t want that to be a part of my education. However, Wikipedia defines mondo thusly, and as a concept of advancement, it’s certainly worth entertaining. Learning without scripture means learning without form strict form, another component of zen.

Nice post, Zack. I find it particularly thought provoking. Mondo is a bit scary. If a zen master doesn’t receive an answer quickly enough from his student, it’s not uncommon for him to beat his student until some sort of answer is uttered. This seems unnecessarily brutal to me. Perhaps an occasional thump to the head from one’s teacher isn’t such a bad thing; however, as I understand it, zen masters often beat their students. If we leave out the beatings, Zen Buddhism seems pretty neat. I think you hit upon a chord of that neatness in your entry.

-Sean

In the technology market, it’s invaluable to have a language that can adapt as fast as you need it to. Rapid prototyping and tracer bullet-style development require quick thinking and even quicker typing. Eval() makes short work of this.

Case in point: In an MVC with an RDB backend, it’s worth while making a generic linking function in your base object. Leverage what you have: an instantiated object pulled from the DB with an attribute/field which is a valid pointer to another loadable object. By using Eval() to load that object, zipping along your foreign keys can be a relative breeze.


if(method_exists($obj, $method))
$result = $obj->{$method}();


or


$function = "nl2br";
echo $function("a\nb");


Recently used this doing some MVC style controllers mapping URLs to models. Obviously, with this kind of flexibility comes responsibility – “eval” style statements can be dangerous without the proper checks and string cleansing.

In more recent versions of PHP, I believe you can also use variables to set classes at runtime just as you can for variables and functions.