Juliette Reinders Folmer said: > Not a fan of using a variable as a return type. This will cause > havoc for Tokenizer based static analysis tooling.
I will concede that until the tools are updated to handle the new (currently invalid) syntax, it would cause issues. But that happens everytime a new syntax is introduced into PHP anyway (the original return-types RFC, match, the proposed property accessors, etc.), so I'm a bit confused as why this is an issue that would stop the RFC? --- Juliette Reinders Folmer said: > Also don't really see the need as there is the `static` return type > already. To quote Nicolas, who said it far better than I could: > I tried switching from the `@return $this` annotation to > `function (): static`, which is the closest approximation currently > supported by the engine, when I realized that this would loosen the > semantics of the corresponding interfaces[.] --- Marco Pivetta said: > I'd see it as useful if the type conveyed identity too, although it > means that I would never use it, since I design immutable APIs, when > possible :D If reading documentation, I'd argue that seeing `function(): $this` in a class already conveys plenty of "identity". If you're talking about using the Reflection API to get identity the original RFC by Nikita stated: > The `$this` type is a subtype of `static`. As such, it is possible > to restrict a `static` type to `$this` in a subclass (but not the > other way around). > In reflection, the `$this` type is represented as a > `ReflectionNamedType` with `isBuiltin() == true` and > `getName() == "$this"`. So perhaps a change is needed in the returned `ReflectionNamedType` to better identity the actual class of `$this`? Or am I missing your point about identity here? --- Bruce Weirdan said: >> Luigi Cardamone wrote: >> Is it possible to replace "$this" with "this"? Cleaner and coherent >> with "self". > > That wouldn't be possible, as `this` is a valid class name: The "Return Type Declarations", "Scalar Type Declarations", "Reserve More Types", and "Void Return Type" RFCs all prohibited their usage as class, interface and trait names. Using `this` or `same` or `whatever` else is decided is just par for the course. However, that said, a search of github for: - `language:php "class This "` returns 5.1k results (but it appears that most results are docblock comments) - `language:php "class This extends"` returns 27 results - `language:php "class This implements"` returns 8 results - `language:php "class Same "` returns 290 results - `language:php "class Same extends"` returns 193 results - `language:php "class Same implements"` returns 14 results - `language:php "@return $this"` returns 485k results. --- Regards, radar3301
