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Date: Tue, 04 Feb 2020 13:55:23 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] What about a magic __toArray() method?
From: tom@inventis.be (Tom Gerrits)

>   Correct: an explicit `$foo->toArray()` call suffices.
> 
>   For other readers, more about `$foo->toArray()` vs `(array) $foo` is
>   described at
> 
> https://github.com/ShittySoft/symfony-live-berlin-2018-doctrine-tutorial/pull/3#issuecomment-460441229

This is a valid point. Perhaps another problem lies at its base: why
can one cast null to a string in PHP? Would it be more appropriate to
throw a CastError or similar? Or does casting null to another type
make sense in some scenarios?

One could go as far as to only allow types that overload the
appropriate cast operator to cast to the type without error. This
implies the question of how to handle built-in types, such as casting
floats to string.

>  - It is less explicit than choosing a purpose-specific method name

I think it's also important to mention whether this discussion is
about explicit casts only, or not - and also about implicit casts, or
coercion.

"(string) $var" doesn't seem a lot less explicit to me than
"$var->toString()", but if it is coerced automatically when being
passed to e.g. a function taking a string, that is of course a
different story.

Coercions and implicit casting using the overloaded operators could
perhaps also be limited to non-strict mode, if desired, which is also
the case for scalar types currently, IIRC.