On 07/07/2020 18:13, Josh Bruce wrote:
Decided to put something
together:https://github.com/joshbruce/external-project-proposals/blob/master/php-concepts/interact-with-instance-as-php.md
Hi Josh,
Reading through this, it seems to cover a few different concepts, which
are certainly related, but not quite the same.
Firstly, we have interfaces such as Countable and Serializable, which
don't make the object act like any particular primitive type, they just
customise its interaction with particular functions. Iterators could
potentially be included in that category, too, because it's fairly easy
to imagine the language having multiple primitive types that can be
iterated (e.g. separate "list" and "dictionary" types).
ArrayAccess feels more explicitly about making an object "act like" an
array, but more precisely it overloads the [] operator - it doesn't
allow the object to be used in other contexts where arrays are allowed.
More general operator overloading was discussed recently, and the
particular proposal put forward did not pass its RFC vote. [1]
__toString, on the other hand, only allows the object to be *converted
to* a string, not act like one. You can't, for instance, influence the
behaviour of the concatenation operator, and make "Hello" . $object .
"!" return an object instead of a string, or a string that doesn't begin
"Hello". An __toArray method was proposed recently, to mixed reaction. [2]
The other closely related topic is what is often discussed as "scalar
methods" or "scalar objects" - the ability to call methods on non-object
values, and possibly to define your own methods that can be called in
this way. This would seem to fit your use case with Shoop quite well:
rather than Shoop::array($array)->first()->unfold(), you would just call
$array->first(). It's fairly high on a lot of people's wish lists, but
there's a lot of details to get right in both design and implementation,
so I strongly recommend searching for previous discussions and proofs of
concept before diving in.
[1] https://wiki.php.net/rfc/userspace_operator_overloading
[2] https://externals.io/message/105589
--
Rowan Tommins (né Collins)
[IMSoP]
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