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Reply-To: Marcus Boerger <helly@php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] what happened to that new isset() like language construct
From: helly@php.net (Marcus Boerger)

Hello Jay,

Thursday, July 8, 2004, 5:31:08 PM, you wrote:

> Marc Richards wrote:
>> 
>> Well I'm partial to ?: and there seemed to be some support for it, but
>> there also seemed to be a non-trivial (though not necessarily difficult)
>> amount of work to get it to work right.
>> 
>> ifsetor() is obviously less concise, but also the name at first glance
>> is a little non-obvious/confusing. I suppose isset() suffers from the
>> same problem, and people will eventuall get used to it.
>> 
>> If the technical problems can be overcome, I'm all for ?: otherwise
>> ifsetor() seemed like the best suggestion so far.  I am far less
>> qualified to come up with an alternative than the more experienced
>> PHP'ers out there.
>> 
>> 
>> Marc

> As far as the name is concerned, I'm kind of partial to coalesce(), as the
> purpose of the function is really similar to the SQL function of the same
> name. This is from the Postgres manual, although I think the function
> itself is from SQL99:

ifsetor is different. It only takes one variable and an optional default
value (any expression).

"ifsetor" "(" <variable> [ "," <expression> ] ")"

Changing it to accept a list of *variables* could probably be possible
but would require heavy restructuring of the compiler. The same is true
for chaning it to accept a variable plus a list of expressions is even
more complicated.

Best regards,
 Marcus                            mailto:helly@php.net