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Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2020 10:23:23 +0100
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To: php internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] [DISCUSSION] Compact Object Property Assignment
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Tommins)

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Hi Jakob,

On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 at 21:57, Jakob Givoni <jakob@givoni.dk> wrote:

>
> I understand and fully agree that COPA is narrow, but I don't really
> understand why that's a problem - I proposed it exactly because I felt that
> its simplicity is its force.
> Low hanging fruit is usually something I would encourage to go after.
> I believe it's a trivial implementation that can help in uncountable
> situations where you just need to assign values to a predefined data
> structure in a single expression.
>
> I'd really like to hear the arguments against such a cost-benefit
> calculation.
>


Others have said it reasonably well, but for me, a key point is that it
reserves a new syntax, with no obvious way of reusing that syntax for any
wider features in future. That weighs in on the cost side of the
calculation, because syntax is a somewhat limited resource - we often have
problems adding things without ambiguity in the parser, and a language with
lots of single-purpose syntaxes is going to be harder to learn than one
with a few multi-purpose syntaxes.

If COPA was the first part of a wider set of complementary features,
building on it as a base, it would be more attractive to me; but as
currently proposed, it feels like any new feature in this area (object
initialisers, named arguments, etc) would have to compete with it instead.

Regards,
-- 
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]

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