Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

One interesting thing about software is that because it is written in a language that a computer can understand, it is also possible, in theory, to get the computer to tell you things about that software. There are various classes of utilities from static analysers to code style checkers, but I have recently been considering how possible it is to check for uses of specific deprecated functions and classes in a PHP project. The actual checker I was thinking of creating would use regular expressions and be written in PHP itself, but because the process would be a static analysis one, which I hoped didn’t have to resort to tokenising the PHP source code it was examining, this checker could in fact be written in any language just as (if not more) easily. As is often the case in my blog posts about PHP recently, it turns out that various “features” of PHP make things more difficult (regardless of the language that the checker is written in), although trying to solve a problem the wrong way doesn’t help either.

I recently had trouble buying something online and this resulted in me having to go into a local branch of the bank with which I had the account I was trying to use. There had actually been several issues which had been accumulating with this account, and so I thought that attending in person might be the quickest way to get things sorted out, but the process ended up taking a lot longer than I thought. Fortunately along the way I had an enlightening and somewhat amusing conversation with the cashier who was trying to help me, and I thought that I should share some of the things I have learnt. For privacy reasons I will not go into details about the current state of my account, nor will I disclose which bank it is I have this account with, but I hope it will give people a benchmark to compare their banks against, and I would be interested to know which banks don’t have the same problems as the ones I describe (or have other problems).