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References: <003a01d4eaf0$c17d6c20$44784460$@jhdxr.com> <alpine.DEB.2.21.1904041706150.11325@singlemalt.home.derickrethans.nl>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.21.1904041706150.11325@singlemalt.home.derickrethans.nl>
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2019 17:39:33 +0100
Message-ID: <CALKiJKr3PWop5ar+wwEKNNGncAzEsXx3bzpqWWNG=FqDoz+_XA@mail.gmail.com>
To: Derick Rethans <derick@php.net>
Cc: CHU Zhaowei <me@jhdxr.com>, PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="000000000000838bbe0585b70485"
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Spread Operator in Array Expression v0.2
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Collins)

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On Thu, 4 Apr 2019 at 17:14, Derick Rethans <derick@php.net> wrote:

> Could you add to the RFC what the exact pain point is that this is
> trying to address? It looks a little like this is just adding syntax for
> the sake of it.
>


Not everything is about pain, some things are just about gain. ;)

The link Levi shared about Dart included some interesting examples of where
spreads are useful, some of which you can probably imagine happening in
PHP:
https://medium.com/dartlang/making-dart-a-better-language-for-ui-f1ccaf9f546c

It also takes us a step closer to having a short-hand for
iterator_to_array, in the shape of [...$iterator]. On its own, that's still
pretty ugly, but it's not hard to come up with cases where it would be a
lot nicer, like concatenating two iterators:

// Before
array_merge(iterator_to_array($iter1), iterator_to_array($iter2))

// Or to generalise to all iterables
array_merge( is_array($iter1) ? $iter1 : iterator_to_array($iter1),
is_array($iter2) ? $iter2 : iterator_to_array($iter2) )

// After (handles both cases)
[ ...$iter1, ...$iter2 ]

Granted, I can't point to a real-life example of that, but it shows that
this isn't just new syntax for something that's already easy.

Regards,
-- 
Rowan Collins
[IMSoP]

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