On Mon, Jan 4, 2016 at 1:39 AM, Nikita Popov <nikita....@gmail.com> wrote: > I'd like to provide some context as to why the current implementation works > as it does. > Thanks for the context, Niki. It makes sense that, with GMP as the flagship target of operator overloading, stripping away the by-ref semantics of objects would be appealing. This way GMP objects just look like regular numbers.
Except they're not. Nor are they really objects at this point. They have no methods, no properties, they're not instantiated with the new keyword, and they have by-value semantics (mostly). That feels really odd to me, that GMP objects, at the moment of their inception were /designed/ to be non-object objects. Would this carry forward to any OOP API we might introduce in the future? i.e. $g->add(123); wouldn't muttate $g, but would return a new instance? Leaving GMP out of the equation for now (and I think we need to have a longer discussion about this, but in another thread), I think the question which remains is: Do we want more non-object objects? Should, for example, SimpleXMLbe constrained by GMP's goals when implementing overloaded operators (no, I don't know what this would look like, it's just a for-instance). If the answer to that is "No" (which I think it is), then the question is: Can we modify the do_operation API in a way that allows GMP to remain psuedo-by-value while still allowing other internal objects which implement overloading to be more correct? I think we can. I'll cobble together a gist of how that might look if there's tentative buy-in, but I'm pretty sure PHP7's variable model does let us do that. -Sara -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
