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Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2021 08:52:17 -0500
To: "php internals" <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: =?UTF-8?Q?Re:_[PHP-DEV]_[VOTE]_ImmutableIterable_(immutable,_rewindable,?=
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From: larry@garfieldtech.com ("Larry Garfield")

On Wed, Jun 16, 2021, at 12:09 PM, Levi Morrison via internals wrote:
> > Over half of the objections are to functionality, over half to unspecified reasons,
> 
> I support people choosing not to directly respond with their
> unspecified reasons, but if anyone is open to sharing I would
> appreciate them doing so. I agree with Nikita that the concept is
> useful, and with some refinement it could be more acceptable to
> voters. If we know more about these "unspecified reasons" then perhaps
> we can improve something for them as well.
> 
> A guess: they don't really want unproven data structures going into
> core, well, because you see the state of some (many) of the SPL data
> structures.

While I like the idea of an immutable collection, and the performance boost seems useful, this proposal seems to go about it in a sloppy way.

1) Iterable doesn't seem like the right "family" for this.  It is iterable, but so are lots of other things.

2) I... have never seen anyone in PHP use "pairs" as a concept.  I have no idea what they're doing here.

3) The JsonSerialize seems out of place.  It may make sense from another angle, but it just sorta appears out of nowhere here.

It almost feels like what you actually want is an immutable Dictionary class.  Such would naturally be iterable, countable, serializing makes some sense, a fromIterable() method would make sense, etc.  That I could get behind, potentially, although it also runs into the exciting question of type restrictions and thus generics, which is where list type discussions go to die. :-)

So it's not the concept I'm against; the angle of attack here feels sloppy and coming at the problem from the wrong angle.

--Larry Garfield