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Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2019 15:38:01 +0000
Message-ID: <CALKiJKo51qNZ0UJJm1JodVKcY959f4Z5hS4stj6bF15iZCDqwg@mail.gmail.com>
To: Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com>
Cc: Levi Morrison <levim@php.net>, Kenneth Ellis McCall <xellisx@gmail.com>, 
	internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [Proposal] Struct Data Types
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Collins)

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On Fri, 15 Mar 2019 at 15:26, Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com> wrote:

> If we introduce something like this, I think it is very important that it
> does not use the same property access syntax as ordinary objects, which are
> not copy-on-write. I do not want to be second guessing whether $x->y = $z
> is going to copy or not. Possibly such struct types should indeed use the
> array access syntax, because array access is generally copy-on-write (the
> exception being ArrayAccess objects).
>


The problem I see with using array-access syntax is that it implicitly
encourages dynamic property access, because the argument is syntactically a
string, not an identifier.

$foo['bar'] = 42;
$foo['bar' . '_2'] = 69; // looks just the same

vs

$foo->bar = 42;
$foo->{ 'bar' . '_2' } = 69; // clearly doing something unusual

I see your point about making the COW more obvious, but I think it should
also be obvious that you're working with a structured type, not a
collection.

We need to invent some more punctuation to use! ;)

Regards,
-- 
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]

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