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Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2022 18:14:36 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [VOTE] User Defined Operator Overloads
From: a.leathley@gmx.net (Andreas Leathley)

On 03.01.22 17:12, Larry Garfield wrote:
> Also, people keep talking about edge cases. In my experience, "are
> these two objects equal" (for some object-specific definition of
> equal) is very much *not* an edge case. I may have less use for
> overloading % as I don't use advanced math that much, but I compare
> things all the frickin' time and that would be incredibly useful day
> to day.

Maybe some of the resistance against this RFC is the (understandable)
focus on mathematical (or mathematical-adjacent) operations, making it
seem that the "real" use-cases are narrow, whereas comparing objects
could make quite a bit of code more readable, like comparing addresses,
prices, availability or location/position. Having regular methods for
operators is possible, but when used a lot the readability does start to
suffer.

The difficulty in arguing for operator overloading might be that the use
cases are specific to a codebase and mainly become apparent once it is
available (currently you just work around it). I do think it is a
reasonable tool to make some code vastly more readable, and I don't see
"novices" using operators a lot - PHP has many simpler features to abuse
that can make code absolutely terrible.

The RFC is really well thought out and reasoned, by the way - great work
Jordan!