Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:105622
MIME-Version: 1.0
References: <FB70FDD7-53AA-4DB4-B747-6E109BE52C2E@gmail.com>
 <384B1934-FC7A-414D-BC31-E5521B2F0E17@benramsey.com> <1BC31028-45B2-4CE6-B85C-EDFD3484DA98@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <1BC31028-45B2-4CE6-B85C-EDFD3484DA98@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 7 May 2019 14:58:20 +0200
Message-ID: <CADyq6s+GW5d-F=SooDH8+Y8Am282ZOvyCY07JjUJTD9-9M+sGA@mail.gmail.com>
To: Steven Wade <stevenwadejr@gmail.com>
Cc: Ben Ramsey <ben@benramsey.com>, PHP Internals List <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="00000000000052031305884bc6f6"
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Proposal for a RFC
From: ocramius@gmail.com (Marco Pivetta)

--00000000000052031305884bc6f6
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Hey Steven,


On Tue, 7 May 2019, 14:25 Steven Wade, <stevenwadejr@gmail.com> wrote:

> > I=E2=80=99m not against the proposal. I=E2=80=99m mainly asking if ther=
e are other ways
> in the language today to accomplish similar things. I would prefer to see
> interfaces used over more magic methods (something like ArraySerializable=
).
>
> A Twitter user pointed out that 7.4 is adding two new magic methods <
> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/custom_object_serialization> - __serialize() and
> __unserialize(). So adding more magic methods to PHP isn't unprecedented.
>
> On the same note, casting is already magical, so controling the
> implementation via a magic method is more in line with current
> functionality.
>

With your current proposal so far, I'd simply have to throw an exception:
`if (method_exists($object, '__toArray')) { throw
UnsupportedObject::from($object); }`

The alternative is to expand the reflection API with an array cast
operation in there, and then migrate existing userland usages to that to
retain BC.

In addition to that, as someone that used to write a lot of `__toString()`
(and now doesn't do that anymore), a clear API and interfaced (non-magic)
`toArray()` is more powerful and useful.

Greets,

Marco

--00000000000052031305884bc6f6--