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Date: Fri, 3 Jan 2020 21:43:22 +0200
Message-ID: <CADQook9TmHRdgL_j2x9QSv4tbWPgW1J78LFNFdU-Y30Gnm-upg@mail.gmail.com>
To: Mike Schinkel <mike@newclarity.net>
Cc: Larry Garfield <larry@garfieldtech.com>, php internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="0000000000005bf6bd059b418666"
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Initializing constants once, with code?
From: kenashkov@gmail.com (Vesko Kenashkov)

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On Fri, Jan 3, 2020 at 8:55 PM Mike Schinkel <mike@newclarity.net> wrote:

> ...
>
> OTOH, if PHP 8.x would allow functions w/o parameters to be called w/o
> parenthesis then your approach satisfy the use-case:
>
> class Stuff {
>     protected $val;
>
>     public static function VAL() {
>          self::$val ??= computeStuff();
>          return self::$val;
>     }
> }
> echo Stuff::VAL;   //<== if this could work then using functions would
> address the use-case.
>
> Hi everyone,

I just wanted to comment on the above - in my view we can not have
someclass::VAL be a constant or a function call of a function that has no
arguments. It is not that it just feels confusing but also may create
issues as a person may invoke multiple times someclass::VAL thinking that
this is a constant (cheap) while in fact it may be a method doing expensive
lookup. And my personal feeling is very much against mixing two completely
different things in this way. This reminds me of Matlab where A(4,5) may be
a function with two arguments, or a matrix lookup (things may have changed
since and may no longer be the case...).

And on a side note - the described problem I solve it in two ways:
- custom autoloader that invokes a initialization method that sets static
vars
- more recently - a class generator (as mentioned above). This gives no
performance hit as Im using Swoole and it happens only at server start.

Thanks
Vesko

-- 
Vesko Kenashkov
Developer at AzonMedia <https://azonmedia.com/> and Guzaba Framework
<https://github.com/AzonMedia/guzaba2>

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